Independent 2025

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present a solo booth of the Los Angeles-based artist Adam Higgins. 

Building on his salad series, Higgins’ new paintings depict salads dressed with raw proteins (shrimp, oysters, octopus tentacles) on top of photographs (a street on the outskirts of Paris, a yacht-populated seascape, the artist’s truck) to dazzling and perplexing effect. The all over composition of the works evokes the potential onanism of mid-century abstraction, while the juxtapositions of imagery would seem to reference photorealism, but the subject matter of the work is elsewhere: the history of painting, spatial perception, i.e., the coexistence of conflicting picture planes, and a certain deadpan humor so deadpan it almost becomes dead-serious. These works could be seen as a response to living in such humorless times, hence their relative ambiguity, but their precision and weirdness leave little doubt about the uniqueness of Higgins’ position in contemporary painting.