Bloom Baby Bloom
New Works by Adam Umbach
Cavalier Gallery, New York
January 23 - February 22, 2025
Bloom Baby Bloom No. 1, 2024
Oil and acrylic on canvas, 54 x 48 in.
© Adam Umbach / Courtesy Cavalier Galleries
Cavalier Gallery in New York presents a solo exhibition of new works by Brooklyn-based artist ADAM UMBACH. Bloom Baby Bloom at the 530 W 24th Street gallery.
The exhibition features more than two dozen new paintings as well as the artist’s sculpture debut with Whaley, a resin-cast oversized recreation of a whale made from famous children’s building blocks. 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. Adam 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. Animal imagery in the form of playthings abounds: building brick dinosaurs, rubber ducks, and more.
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. Adam 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.
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.
Adam 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.
ADAM UMBACH
Born in Chicago in 1986, Adam Umbach currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Inspired from an early age by the Modern Masters collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, he received his BFA in painting from the University of Wisconsin. Beginning his painting career with minimalist canvases based on the enigmatic names of color swatches, Umbach’s creative approach has expanded to experiments with abstraction, geometric painting, and expressionism. The evolution of Umbach’s painting is markedly influenced by his surroundings, from the maritime imagery and seaside colors from his time living in East Hampton, New York and Islesboro, Maine to the graphic style of New York City’s architecture and graffiti. Umbach’s work pairs formalist explorations with photorealistic depictions of recognizable objects, including boats, toys such as rubber ducks and teddy bears, and pink flamingo lawn ornaments. A biographical painter, Umbach’s chosen subjects, which often repeat through differing bodies of work, belong to a personal and familial iconography. Though sourced from his life, Umbach’s paintings invite viewers to connect with this imagery by evoking their own experiences and memories.
CAVALIER GALLERY NYC
West 24th Street, New York, NY
