ADAM BATEMAN: THE FIELD PAINTINGS

Inevitable Objects is pleased to present this series of recent paintings by Adam Bateman, in which the artist explores the past and present of the American West, including his own experience of agricultural practices, through the visual language of gestural abstract painting.  The imagery draws upon the marks left on the land as a result of repeated cycles of plowing, planting, irrigating, and harvesting.

After painstakingly depositing a heavy accretion of acrylic colors and spray enamel, Bateman then engages in a sort of choreographed wrestle with the canvas in which he creates deep gouges in the surface that expose the under-layers and coalesce into rhythmic expanses of furrows and ridges.

These are serious paintings. The scale, the assertive use of materials, physicality of the movements, restrained palette and austere range of mark-making techniques all attest to the artist’s profound earnestness, commitment, even solemnity.

Bateman characterizes his work as “an investigation of the romanticization of the West.”  By means of color and canvas he is exploring the conceptual frontier where the Gold Rush, Manifest Destiny, Spaghetti Westerns, National Parks, Butch Cassidy and the Road Runner intersect with the daily reality of living in a place where recent history is defined by conflict between peoples, and the present is defined by conflict with the land itself. 

Bateman’s work harnesses the visual language of mid 20th century Gestural Abstraction, with highly active surfaces that come into being as an artifact of the artist’s performative engagement with the canvas, specifically his miniaturized simulation of the imagined paths of industrial farming machinery.

While one might be aware intellectually that life depends upon a relationship to the land, this condition is inescapable in the American West, where both year-to-year and day-to-day survival often depends upon negotiating endemic drought, wildfires, earthquakes and dust storms. In this immense, unyielding and untameable territory, humankind’s struggle finds its incarnation in the twin impulses of agriculture and urban development, both of which are perceptible in Bateman’s paintings. 

The scraped, channeled topographies of these pictures give physical form to the artist's internal struggle to confront —or perhaps even discover beauty within— his own personal context in space and time. Bateman’s space is emphatically the American West, and the time is the troubled, contradictory now.  These are pictures that prove, as Robert Storr put it, good painters paint in the present tense.

Adam Bateman's work has been exhibited globally, including in museum exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Fine Art, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, the BYU Museum of Art, the Schnieder Art Museum, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the Akurari Art Museum, Disjecta, and the Barrick Museum.  He received an MFA from Pratt Institute and is a recipient of the Utah Artist Fellowship and the Joan Mitchell Fellowship.  Bateman has curated exhibitions around the United States, and was the founder and Executive Director of CUAC, an award winning non-profit art venue located in Salt Lake City.