BLOOM BABY BLOOM

New Works by Adam Umbach

January 23 - February 22, 2025

Adam Umbach’s solo exhibition with Cavalier Gallery is on view Thursday, January 23 through Saturday, February 22 at 530 West 24th Street,
New York, NY.

The show takes its title from a series of large floral still lifes by the artist and befits this stage of his career. Following on his highly successful solo debut in Chelsea in 2023—an exhibition the artist titled Never Grow Up—the paintings on view in Bloom Baby Bloom reflect an artist who is blossoming into a newfound maturity, creating works immediately identifiable as of his hand and continuing to push boundaries. Umbach remains inspired by the natural world, with flowers popping up in many of the new canvases, an ongoing fascination with honeybees, and a deep emotional connection to the ocean.

Photo by Linda Betty Manyisha,
Artist’s Studio, 2024

Bloom Baby Bloom No. 1, 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 54 x 48 in.

Bloom Baby Bloom No. 3, 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 54 x 48 in.

Bloom Baby Bloom No. 2, 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 54 x 48 in.

Bee Scene No. 3, 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 54 in.

3 Buds (Orange, Yellow, Pink), 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, Each 12 x 9 in.

Bee Scene No. 3 (Light Green), 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 36 x 30 in.

Umbach’s work brings several artistic forebears to mind, if in concept more than form. Riffing on himself as he does with series like Love Daze and 3 Buds has a Warholian vibe. Umbach toys with the idea of unique paintings as multiples and highlights branded, factory-made objects as subjects worthy of focused study. In doing so, he wanders freely among notions of fine art as rarity and commodity even while emphasizing his authorship. This iterative approach could also be considered something of a conceptual hybrid between the French Impressionists’ repeated explorations of a specific landscape view at various times of day, and the more formal color theory experiments of someone like Josef Albers.

Love Daze (Pink, Blue, Light Grey, Navy, Yellow, Dark Grey), 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, Each 12 x 9 in.

Love Hunt, 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 73 1/2 x 81 in.

Here is an artist who thoroughly embraces hybridity: the formal grounding of his current body of work lies in the synthesis of realistically rendered elements and expressive mark making. A make the rules/break the rules ethos permeates his paintings, a sort of joyful transgression that is widely relatable, if not in viewers’ adult lives, then perhaps in the younger versions of themselves they’d like to reclaim. Some of the canvases on view are subject-matter centric, with characters from childhood or imagination coming to life in vignettes that invite storytelling. Others flirt with pure abstraction, wherein a recognizable object, or glimpse of one, serves as a simplified shape or color block, as in the nautical themed Whalebone and Sun Soaked.

Sunny Fish No. 3, 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 in.

Duck Light (Bright Blue), 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 40 x 36 in.

Whalebone, 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 30 x 36 in.

Summer Drift No. 2, 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 in.

Sweet Smells, 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 36 x 72 in.

Love Storm No. 2 (Green), 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 36 x 24 in.

Blue Flowers, 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 30 x 36 in.

Umbach’s works are mixed media paintings, which he simplifies in description as oil and acrylic on canvas. However, he owes his lush and tactile surfaces to not just types of paint but a range of application modes and tools, including oil sticks, aerosol paint pens, brushwork, and rollers. He often switches between his dominant and non-dominant hand while working, creating a frisson between the scripted and the improvised. The new paintings have more textural variation than ever, and it is this raw physicality married to emotional expression that arguably is the essence of the artist’s allure.

Shark Hunt, 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 54 x 62 in.

Medieval Times, 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 12 x 36 in.

Blue Boi (Yellow), 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 in.

Rainbow Sail, 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 60 x 54 in.

Sun Soaked (Blue), 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 36 in.

Wavey Season IV, 2024
oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 78 in.

In addition to more than two dozen new paintings, this exhibition marks the artist’s sculpture debut with Whaley, a resin-cast recreation of a whale made from famous children’s building blocks. The exhibition also includes oil paintings inspired by the same subject.