hpgrp gallery NY is pleased to announce an exhibition of sculpture by artist Adam Bateman. The exhibition “Greener Pastures or The Effect of Imposing a Modern Aesthetic on a Traditional Landscape” will take place at the gallery September 4-October 2, 2009.

Bateman graduated with an MFA from Pratt Institute in 2003 and has subsequently exhibited his work widely across the United States and has had two solo exhibitions in Iceland.  He has received press coverage in the New York Times, Denver Post, Salt Lake Tribune, Hudson Reporter, Iceland’s Morgunbladid, and Sculpture Magazine, among others.  In addition to his art, he works as a freelance curator for the Central Utah Art Center and he is the director of Birch Creek Residency, an artist residency program in Utah.
           
Bateman’s work resides between the ideal and the self-conscience, the transcendental and the modern. Understanding the contrast between the transcendence associated with early American landscape painting and the then new industrialized world with which the Modernists were dealing he is able to focus on tradition, both personal and art historical, and also formal concerns.

Growing up in rural central Utah in a predominantly Mormon community Bateman developed a strong and deep connection to the pastoral and the Divine. With intimate and first-hand knowledge about man's ability to tame the land and to transform what is a "high desert" environment into a producing and useful space Bateman adds a personal layer of understanding and draws a connection between the rhetoric of transcendence found in both early American landscape painting and modernism.

Bateman’s work utilizes materials that call back to his youth; sprinkler pipes, couplings, risers, rain birds, wheels and pipes. Using readily available materials found in his landscape Bateman is able to focus on the formal aspects of his media. Linear sculptures that create three dimensional spatial drawings and repetitive shapes that twist in space creating beautiful spiraling forms that fit within a Modernist context.

By creating new visual landscapes imbued with personal and cultural meaning the work re-asserts itself into a dialogue that ties traditional landscape painting and Modernism together establishing a new art rhetoric of conceptual-formal-craft rigor.

I’m not that interested in experiencing transcendence through art viewing; nor am I interested in creating a transcendental experience for others (maybe I am).  What I am interested in is the rhetoric of transcendence in Modernism and how it dovetails with, opposes, informs, reacts to, and undermines the rhetoric of transcendence in the tradition of landscape painting.   I’m interested in art that is about something—that builds for itself a dialectic and holds to it—art that can stand on its own and knows where it stands. 

Working with irrigation equipment I explore my roots, as a pipe-mover during high school (and now), and as a descendent of Mormon Pioneers who built the first modern irrigation system in North America when they arrived in Utah.  The Mormons sought transcendence through irrigation—they saw God’s power in “making a desert blossom like a rose.”

By combining existing irrigation implements into sculptures that remain true to the material (attaching the pipes to water would make the rainbirds rain), like Puryear, I attempt to combine the formal concerns of abstraction with iconic materials ever-present in the Western landscape to reconcile the landscape tradition with that of Modern sculpture.  The inherent nature of the materials I’m using is that they are quite linear and quite large.  Their linear nature begs to be treated as much as drawing as sculpture.

Ultimately, by trying to reconcile form and content, Modernism and Traditional Landscape, and by flooding the work with personal-cultural meaning, I hope to transcend traditional Art Historical boundaries and re-assert an art-rhetoric of conceptual-formal-craft rigor.