Derrick Adams

Gagosian is pleased to announce Derrick Adams: The Strip, the gallery’s debut exhibition in Korea. New work by Adams will be presented in the headquarters of Amorepacific, the world-renowned Korean beauty and cosmetic company, in the center of Seoul, opening on September 3, 2024, alongside the third edition of the Frieze Seoul art fair. The exhibition will be held in the APMA Cabinet, a project space on the ground floor of the David Chipperfield–designed building.

In this latest body of work, Adams has made a series of paintings inspired by the display windows of beauty supply stores both near his Brooklyn studio and throughout the world. Representing groups of mannequin heads adorned with colorful wigs, they are framed by textured reliefs of bricks marked by layers of paint and traces of city life. Incorporated into the compositions are reflections of sidewalks, roads, and cars—a merging of interior and exterior spaces. Created in various sizes and configurations, the paintings are complemented by two sculptures made with mannequin heads and wigs.

Adams draws from the strategies of Pop art, highlighting commercial display, consumer products, and desire. He constructs his paintings with interlocking planes of color, abstracting the heads to suggest the multiplicity of identity. In addition, his experimental approach to the representation of Black urban life was inspired in part by artist Romare Bearden’s panoramic collage, The Block (1971, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Derived from many locales, Adams’s subjects are Black women who embody the roles of both consumer and muse. Their engagement with various forms of costuming is cross-cultural—often the prototype for how the transformation of appearance expresses style, attitude, and individualism.