Works Exhibited
About
This body of work flirts with the idea of sensuality—images fused with constructs of desire, self-embodiment, humor, and normalcy. There are no limits to character building and the elaborate environments of these paintings are the manifestation of that feeling.
—Derrick Adams
Gagosian is pleased to announce Derrick Adams’s debut exhibition with the gallery, which will open on September 14, 2023, in Beverly Hills. For Come as You Are, Adams continues to develop pictorial vignettes centering the Black figure, this time in new works born from the artist’s imagined invitation to the real or fictional personalities he paints.
The exhibition’s title offers encouragement to be present without the need to conceal one’s true self, dreams, and aspirations—a prompt to shed the pressures of adaptation and conformity. Adams counters hackneyed narratives by presenting figures in moments of carefree leisure, inspired by his belief in the constructive power of scenes that uplift and support Black culture. Adding elements of fantastical daydreams along with a few icons familiar from previous series, he dramatizes lived experience and self-actualization in compositions that balance vivid and muted tones, flat planes and multidimensional space.
Inspired by a Halloween costume once worn by the artist’s aunt, Be the Table (all works 2023) merges the levity of a masquerade party with themes surrounding equity and access. The intermingling of her features with a table setting complete with cups and slices of cake, means that she no longer needs “a seat at the table.” Lookie Loos represents the window display of a beauty supply store near Adams’s studio in Brooklyn. A tribute to the power of self-adornment, it explores a theme also present in his Style Variation series (2019–21). Creative expression is central to Taking It on the Road, in which a female figure plays a banjo, an instrument with deep roots in the African diaspora and American popular music. Encircled by cars, she is envisioned as at one with the lyrics of her song.
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Come As You Are: Derrick Adams
Jewels Dodson visited artist Derrick Adams at his New York studio as he prepared for an exhibition of new paintings in Los Angeles in the fall of 2023. She reports on these works and on Adams’s embrace of joy, humor, and contradiction.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2023
The Fall 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Derrick Adams’s Everything and a Ring (2023) on its cover.
In Conversation
Amanda Williams and Derrick Adams
On the occasion of her exhibition Amanda Williams: CANDYLADYBLACK at Gagosian in New York, the artist spoke with artist Derrick Adams about the way she uses color as a tool to examine the complex ways in which race informs our assignment of value to physical, social, and conceptual spaces.
