Retrospective by Adam Himebauch serves as the physical culmination to his yearlong digital performance project Back to the Future.
Retrospective presents seven large-scale immersive landscape paintings that employ color in unexpected ways. Himebauch has an eye on the past as he creates his work. Works like House on Hopper Hills 1979 is a celebration of Edward Hopper, whose interrogation of urban architecture, rural landscape, and intimate glimpses of humanity offer are echoed in Himebauch’s careful compositions. Vincent Needle in Yellow Haze 1981 offers an homage to Vincent Van Gogh and his special relationship to yellow.
Himebauch first found renown with his performative street art project, Hanksy. This practice allowed Himebauch to explore humor, political satire, and direct social commentary in his work that confronted the viewer more directly. Himebauch’s studio practice was more controlled. He worked on abstracted urban landscapes with hard edges and sharp lines. Their careful composition extends into the construction of works such as Early AM on the Well-Kept Walk 1981. The relationship between Himebauch’s controlled hard edge works and his landscapes with looser brushstrokes illuminate his exploration of space and place. Each work is a window to somewhere.
Looking to the past is not merely an act of reverence for those who came before him. Finding inspiration in the past is part of how Himebauch reconciles his place in the world as an artist. Himebauch has spent the last few years toiling over the idea of memory, history, and reality as well as the information we consume daily. Using social media, Himebauch’s Back to the Future constructs a reality that engaged with the past and future. Truth, in the context of this project, is a currency.
Utilizing social media and the digital landscape as a media, through “fake” social media accounts Himebauch was able to generate “real” interaction. Himebauch used this project to place a version of himself in an alternate reality in which he was living and working with great success in the 1980s and 90s. Reframing both his image and his art, Back to the Future involves staging a variety of events and activations in downtown New York and creating faux exhibitions, institutions, posters, books, media, and ephemera of a full life lived by a conceivable alternate Adam Himebauch. This sustained performance throughout 2022 has generated real faux narratives and interacted with the pliability of truth.
Retrospective will be on view at 168 Suffolk Street through December 17, 2022.
