Darts of Pleasure

Adam Lupton

Achilles Gaze

Adam Lupton

Styrofoam Boots

Adam Lupton

Fingertip Feelings

Adam Lupton

Artist’s Statement

My work teeters between the emotional and the pictorial. By mining personal and collective assumptions and hollowing out culturally potent symbols and mythologies, I explore individual and societal anxiety and isolation.

In approaching a range of layered themes and narratives, I aim to eliminate prescriptive visual outcomes. Subjects are often given antithetical functions and signifiers are emptied of conventional signification, destabilizing the affect of form and content. With Plato’s allegory of the cave in mind, I attempt to reconsider and restructure the way viewers negotiate their reality and ideology by troubling both visual representation and emotional interpretation.

For some, my work divulges more than is expected, for others not enough. One experience may be unpleasantly full, while the other is painfully vacant.

about the artist

Born and raised in Vancouver, Canada (1987), Adam Lupton graduated from Emily Carr University with his Bachelors degree in Communication Design. Soon after, he realized his passion was in painting and shifted his focus on his own work, opening an art gallery and exhibiting his work throughout Vancouver. Four years later, he moved to New York, graduating from the New York Academy of Art with his MFA in 2016. Lupton has shown in Vancouver, New York, Paris, Beijing, and Leipzig among others. He has been awarded residencies to the Leipzig International Art Programme and the Eric Fischl Artist-In-Residences Program in Maryland, and grants twice from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation.