Adam Higgins at Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present Lollipop, Los Angeles-based painter Adam Higgins’ second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition features paintings of translucent-handled screwdrivers on top of images. For these works, Higgins arranges screwdrivers on top of photographic prints, then pho-tographs the pairings again to use as references for each painting. The under-lying snapshots consist of scenes the artist takes from his daily life. A viewer’s experience of these paintings changes depending on the distance from which they are seen. From afar, they are all about photography: pictures of objects and objects on pictures. At middle distance, the paint reveals the artist’s af-fection for gesture, color and formal structure. Drawn close, they explode into a welter of abstract fundament. The screwdriver, a hard yet changeable ob-ject, looks less like itself the longer one looks at it. An object like that can be a companion across lifetimes, a prop in a theater, a stone in a poem, or candy in a picture, e.g: “As a boy, he found it perfectly normal to insert a lollipop into his mouth, but as he pulled out a screwdriver, he awoke as an old man in his workshop.”

Adam Higgins (b. 1989, Huntington Beach, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include My Salad Years: La Suite, Place des Vosges, Paris, 2023; My Salad Years, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, 2023; Lonesome, Tops Gallery, Memphis, 2022; and Flatfish, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles, 2020. Recent group exhibitions include Muna Island, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, 2026; Trespass sweetly urged, Tanya Leighton, Berlin, 2024; Nián Nián: The Power and Agency of Animal Forms, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2023; No Hard Place, Galerie Dengyun, Shanghai, 2022; and The Imaginary Sea, Villa Car-mignac, Hyères, 2021.