My Salad Years: La Suite

Caesar salad with anchovies, 2023. Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 48 x 57 in (121.92 x 144.78 cm)

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present Adam Higgins - My Salad Years: La Suite hosted in our temporary gallery space at 10 Place des Vosges, Paris.

For his exhibition at the gallery, Higgins will present a series of salad paintings. Which is to say paintings of salad. Caesar salads to be exact. Caesar salads with croutons, cheese, whole anchovies, raw squid and cubes of ice, not to mention a fly. And, of course, lots and lots of dressing.

The paintings are always views from above, ranging from the classical tondo salad portrait to an “all over” composition strewn across a cutting board of, at times, exceedingly large dimensions. As such, the salads flirt with the conventional idiom of culinary photography and, more broadly, the history of painting. They at once call to mind 17th century Dutch still life and the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, among other things. At first blush, they may seem to be just salads, but on closer, more sustained review, they are about so much more. Such as painting, and more specifically, abstraction (You want abstraction? I’ll give you salad). Light, the more unnatural the better. Foodie photography. An unexpected, if unsettling and graphic eroticism (Salad porn?). A quality of excess which feels distinctly and uniquely American in its fanatical will to careen toward ‘too much of a good thing’ in the spirit of, say, the wellness-industrial complex. In other words, spiritual redemption. As if salad could save you. And maybe it can? Or maybe paintings of it can? It’s doubtful. Whatever the case may be, these surprising pictures are strangely timely. Even zeitgeist-y. Refreshingly so. In a way you didn’t know you wanted or needed. And in this way, maybe they do come with a touch, or better, a pinch of salvation.

Adam Higgins (b. 1989 Huntington Beach, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Recent solo exhibitions include (2022) My Salad Years, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles; (2022) Lonesome, Tops Gallery, Memphis and; (2020) Flatfish, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include (2021) The Imaginary Sea (curated by Chris Sharp), Villa Carmignac, Porquerolles, France; (2018) Heads/Tails, Next to Nothing, New York and; (2018) Way Out Now, Diane Rosenstein, Los Angeles. The artist earned an MFA from Yale University in 2018 and a BFA from the Memphis College of Art in 2012