Adam Saks: Lonestar

When we stand before the art of Adam Saks we find ourselves assailed by multiple impressions. The tough, macho, military and naval content is balanced against a sense of loneliness. Is this merely nostalgic adventure or do we sense something frightening? And all this reflected in symbols derived from a male world – military emblems and tattooing. The Nordic Watercolour Museum now presents Adam Saks’s first one-man exhibition in Sweden.

Adam Saks is an exciting artist who poses difficult questions. His works appear as fragmented landscapes, devoid of people but rich in symbols of human origin – tattoos, architectural structures, and objects where he experiments not only with the two dimensional surface but even with physical space itself. His work is powerful and expressionistic in both form and content, but at the same time remarkably personal yet of general significance. In the investigative search that he has been pursuing for several years now he has expanded his magical world to embrace elements of extreme masculinity. We are led, as if by a kaleidoscope, to focus our whole attention on masculinity, sexuality and violence, on death, woman and love, as well as upon ideology and morality and concepts of respect and honour.

He has as his starting point a personal narrative in a pictorial world which is paradoxically both ancient and contemporary, harsh and sympathetic and which eagerly questions our history and the age in which we live. These works force us to think twice on the significance of symbols and realities, concepts with numerous and often very problematical meanings and origins. Adam Saks was born in Copenhagen in 1974.

He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Art from 1993-99 and at the Berlin Academy of Art from 1996-97 for Professor Bernd Koberling. And it was just Koberling’s free and distinctive pictorial idiom in the depiction of natural experiences which particularly interested Adam Saks. He lives and works in Berlin. He works in parallel with painting, graphic art, watercolour and ceramics.

He has exhibited in Denmark and France, and he is represented at the Statens Museum for Kunst and the Sönderjyllands Kunstmuseum in Denmark, and at the Malmö Konstmuseum in Sweden among other places. In this his first one-man exhibition in Sweden Adam Saks will be showing almost a hundred new watercolours, some large scale, along with ceramics. All these works were created especially for the Nordic Watercolour Museum. We shall also meet the artist and his work in a publication and in a film recorded in his Berlin studio last year. Lonestar is the symbol associated with the lone cowboy or adventurer – or maybe an ambivalent masculinity. The exhibition Lonestar presents impressive works accompanied by texts, symbols and landscapes all of which incite to conflicting and powerful emotions.

Adam Saks
Lonestar