Emily Mae Smith & Adam Henry – The Little Apocrypha – Curated by Samuel Leuenberger and Elise Lammer

Working primarily with oil paint on linen, Emily Mae Smith’s work consists of fantasy-fuelled imagery, whose formal vocabulary borrows aspects from Hyper Realism, Pop Art and Surrealism. Inspired by design and illustration histories, Smith’s innocent and colourful unreal bodies often allow the artist to explore feminist theories about corporeality.

Adam Henry’s works, typically made from brushed and sprayed polymers on linen are often simultaneously indefinite and precise; color occupies rigidly spaced planes on the canvas but then blooms, fading into white or dispersing into a gradient. In reference to Modernist concrete painting, his geometric compositions have a strong mystical component, whereby the medium serves the artist to transcend the logical.

For their first exhibition in Switzerland, which also marks their first official collaboration, the artists produce a new body of work inspired by the fictional “brain planet” imagined in Stanislaw Lem’s book ‘Solaris’ (1961). Transforming the exhibition floor into an entropic alien terrain, the duo then contemplates through a new series of paintings, the relationship between anatomy and consciousness. Acknowledging that every change in science comes from pseudo science, the duo utilizes the idea of the apocrypha as catalyst. The collaboration questions authorship and the canon of accepted knowledge.

Mostly working with oil, Emily Mae Smith’s work consists of fantasy-fuelled paintings, whose formal vocabulary borrows aspects from Hyper Realism, Pop Art and Surrealism. Inspired by Disney characters and other Western cartoon, Smith’s innocent and colourful unreal bodies often allow the artist to explore feminist theories about corporeality.

Adam Henry’s works, typically made from sprayed synthetic polymers on linen, are often simultaneously indefinite and precise; color occupies rigidly spaced planes on the canvas but then blooms, fading into white or dispersing into a gradient. In reference to Modernist painting, his geometric compositions have a strong mystical component, whereby the medium serves the artist to transcend the logical in order to reach the spiritual.

SALTS would like to thank Swisslos-Fonds Basel-Landschaft, Fondation Nestlé pour l’Art, Migros Kulturprozent, Roldenfund Stiftung and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia for the generous support.

Gallery hours by appointment only, please call +41 79 372 81 75

www.salts.ch

Location:
SALTS
Hauptstrasse 12
4127 Birsfelden
Switzerland