Adam Henry at Candice Madey

CANDICE MADEY is pleased to introduce the gallery’s first exhibition with NY-based artist Adam Henry, God Speed Speed Demon. The exhibition presents new paintings that expand on Henry’s use of painting history, color spectrums, and seriality to explore the visual language of abstract thought.

Work in God Speed Speed Demon includes objects such as lightbulbs, flashlights, and stars set within grids, gradients, or monochromes. Henry explores forms that operate reciprocally as images and as symbols to understand how abstract thought—often scientific, cosmic, and spiritual in nature–is represented. He finds inspiration and unexpected correlations in the graphic language of scientific journals (on astrophysics, neuroscience, or the natural sciences); in religious icons of Italian Renaissance painting and Medieval manuscripts; in petroglyphs, and in science fiction.

Our desire to capture the immensity of universal concepts is ongoing, and consensus has evolved over millennia to designate visual forms for these concepts. The speed of light, the scale of the universe, the ecstatic revelations of spirituality, moral imperatives such as justice, freedom and equality: each of these pursuits continues to draw profound human inquiry. Henry’s painting practice addresses the resurgent interest in the cosmic and the universal–themes that speak to a complicated present moment. Whereas his early paintings explored optical experience, new works consider the subjectivity of perception in relationship to cognition and conditioning. Against the backdrop of “post- truth” politics and an increasingly digital experience of our world, notions of reality, scientific fact, and objective observation are more prescient than ever. For Henry, scientific and spiritual exchange shape a positive space for both artistic process and in lived experience.

The title of the show, God Speed Speed Demon, reads like concrete poetry–a practice that Henry returns to in the studio with frequency. Here, the title nods playfully to the speed of light, arduous pilgrimages, deities and demons, car racing, and pop cultural references from Henry’s youth, suggesting that any quest for the universal truth is inescapably entangled with contemporaneous life.

Adam Henry (b. Pueblo, Colorado) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He holds a BFA in Art and Art History from the University of New Mexico and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. Recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at River Valley Arts Collective, Hudson, NY; The Ice House, Garrison, NY; Meessen De Clercq, Brussels, Belgium; 247365, New York; and the University of Wisconsin-Stout, Menomonie; and group shows at SALTS, Birsfelden, Switzerland; Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York; Rita Urso, Milan, Italy; Dia Horia, Mykonos, Greece; and Bill Brady, Miami, FL. A monograph on his work from 2011–16 was published by Meessen De Clercq.