Adam Higgins' paintings begin with simple premises. A painting of a caesar salad – vivid romaine, attractively tossed, strewn with pearlescent dressing – is an easy invitation. But once inside, we find there’s nowhere to go, no room behind the roughage. The surface is where the action is, and where matters go from simple to very complicated. Higgins’ surfaces require slow looking. At close range, they break down into a post-impressionist search for true chroma, for color as the key to undoing and reassembling perception. At mid-range, it is all about photography; camera obscura techniques used in Dutch still life meets glossy magazine spreads. Another step back and we’re returned to pure abstraction. Everything is in focus and therefore unseeable. Subjects in Higgins’ work are repeated and lose their coherency, the same way that a common word, repeated for the millionth time, becomes absurd. There’s a joke here. But Higgins’ work argues that the joke is on all of us. As Goethe said, “Only everybody can know the truth.”

Adam Higgins (b. 1989, Huntington Beach, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles.

Recent solo exhibitions include My Salad Years: La Suite, Place des Vosges, Paris, 2023; My Salad Years, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, 2023; Lonesome, Tops Gallery, Memphis, 2022; and Flatfish, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles, 2020.

Recent group exhibitions include Trespass sweetly urged, Tanya Leighton, Berlin, 2024; Nián Nián: The Power and Agency of Animal Forms, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2023; No Hard Place, Galerie Dengyun, Shanghai, 2022; and The Imaginary Sea, Villa Carmignac, Hyères, 2021.