Adam Henry

CANDICE MADEY is excited to announce Terra Informa, the gallery’s third solo exhibition by New York–based artist Adam Henry, in its 1 Freeman Alley location. Terra Informa will include new paintings that explore the subjectivity of perception through a series of abstracted, fantastical compositions that refer to land, sky, gravity, time, and enigmatic events.

In his work, Henry investigates the difference between the lived, intuited experience of our environment, and systems-based or diagrammatic representations of the world as depicted in art and in science. Here, he imagines untethered versions of such schematics, suggesting the increasingly fragmented and interpretive nature of what is proffered as fact. Ambiguous events, structures, or systems appear unmoored from the picture’s ground, evoking the supernatural, the spiritual, and the hallucinatory.

Henry frequently cites early encounters of the New Mexico desert, where he grew up, as formative to his work. The sublime nature of vast sky and endless horizons, and a palette of deep blues, dense matte black, and vibrant spectral forms permeate the new paintings—which the artist refers to as “dimensionscapes.”

The compositions revisit a frequent theme in Henry’s work, the color spectrum, moving beyond the purely formal effects of hue to explore the potential cultural and personal symbolism of prismatic colors and gradients. Within the figure/ground dichotomies, color spectrums suggest figurative forms, alluding to specters, angels, and other non-corporeal entities that can be seen throughout religious art and mythology. (For example, the angel in the biblical Book of Ezekiel, who appears as a floating being with many eyes, is referenced in the title of a painting.) Henry states, “In the past, the spectrum has symbolized seeing, subjective difference, and incremental change in my work. Here, the spectrum performs as an avatar for the limitations of perception.”

Henry’s work has frequently incorporated concrete poetry, language, and recognizable symbols in the past to understand human cognition. In Terra Informa, he sets aside the confines of bookish human knowledge, exploring similar themes of perception through more sensory experiences of the environment.

Adam Henry (b. 1975, Pueblo, CO) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include CANDICE MADEY, New York (2023, 2021); River Valley Arts Collective, Hudson, NY (2019); JDJ The Ice House, Garrison, NY (2019); SALTS, Basel, Switzerland, with Emily Mae Smith (2017); University of Wisconsin-Stout, Menomonie, WI, with Anders Nilsen (2017); Meessen De Clercq, Brussels, Belgium (2015); and select group exhibitions at The Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, NY (2024); JDJ, New York (2023, 2021); Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago (2023); Mother Gallery, Beacon, NY (2023); Schloss Moyland Museum, Bedburg-Hau, Germany (2023); CHART, New York (2022); Alexander Berggruen, New York (2021); Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York (2019); Essex Flowers, New York (2019); Harper’s, East Hampton (2018).

Henry’s work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artnet, Art Papers, The Brooklyn Rail, Connaissance des Arts, Harper’s Bazaar, Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz, New York Times, and L’Officiel Italia, among other publications, and a monograph on his work was published by Meessen De Clercq in 2016. He is the cofounder of Elective Affinity Press, an artist-run independent producer of books and editions, and holds a BFA in Art and Art History from the University of New Mexico and an MFA from the Yale School of Art.

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