He Grew Up in Chicago. Now His Work Comes Home.
An Artist Spotlight
Adam Umbach was born in Chicago. Now he returns home.
The Weight of Play is Adam's first solo exhibition in the city of his birth, is not simply a show arriving in Chicago. It is a show made possible by Chicago.
As a boy in this city, Umbach found solace through art: painting in his room, redrawing postcards, visiting the Chicago Art Institute on weekends with his grandmother. Those early encounters with Seurat and Picasso and the American modernists, given by a woman who understood what access to beauty could do for a child from a turbulent household, left a mark that has never left his work. You can see it in the way he approaches color: not as description, but as feeling.
Adam Umbach lost his father at seventeen. His mother's death years later, following a long shadow of domestic violence, collapsed whatever remained of a conventional story. What Umbach built from those losses was not cynicism, but color. Not bitterness, but bees and butterflies, goldfish and sailboats.
These are not naive choices. They are deliberate ones.
He earned his BFA in painting at the University of Wisconsin, lived in mid-coast Maine and in East Hampton, and eventually settled in Brooklyn. He showed in Nantucket, the Hamptons, Art Miami, Moniker Art Fair in New York, and at JR Gallery in Berlin earlier this year. His work has been featured in Elle Decor and Hamptons Magazine. His collector base spans New York, the Hamptons, Nantucket, Maine, Seoul, and beyond. Through all of it, Chicago waited.
about adam umbach's artistic style
In the studio, Umbach paints with both hands. He builds each composition first with his dominant right hand, working with photorealistic precision — a bumblebee rendered vein by vein, a bloom luminous and still. Then he switches to his left, introducing the gestural marks that run across his panels like a second, freer language: loops, scrawls, handwriting with nowhere to go — the naif tradition, in the lineage of Cy Twombly and Jean-Michel Basquiat, practiced with full intention. The tension between those two modes — between control and release, between the artist he trained himself to be and the child he is finally allowing himself to become — is what makes standing in front of one of his paintings such a specific experience.
The Weight of Play — on view at Carousel Fine Art's Chicago gallery, 230 W Superior St, through November 8, 2026 — brings Adam Umbach's body of work to the city where the story began. His imagery invites viewers to connect through their own memories: each motif simultaneously his and yours.
There is something particular about seeing this exhibition in Chicago. In New York and the Hamptons and Berlin, his work arrived as dispatches from elsewhere. Here, the distance closes. The postcards he redrew as a boy in this city, the masters he studied at the Art Institute, the grandmother who believed in access — all of it echoes in the room. Umbach's paintings have always been correspondence. This is the letter arriving home.
His imagery invites that recognition across a spectrum of motifs: bumblebees rendered vein by vein, goldfish suspended in fields of hot magenta, rare blue lobsters in hand-painted neon borders, lily pads in cobalt and rose. Each object belongs simultaneously to Umbach's private world and to the shared vocabulary of childhood, simultaneously his and yours.
His hope is that through seeing his work, viewers will recognize, among all the darkness, a spark of joy, some sort of hope that keeps you moving forward.
