A Homecoming Worth Seeing: The Weight of Play in Chicago
If you walk past Carousel Fine Art on W Superior Street without going in this October, you will have missed one of the most exciting shows in Chicago this season. Adam Umbach's The Weight of Play, opens October 8, 2026, and for the city where Umbach was born, this one lands differently.
Umbach grew up in Chicago, visiting the Art Institute on weekends with his grandmother. He lost his father here at seventeen. He built his career everywhere else, Maine, the Hamptons, Brooklyn, Berlin, and now he has come back with new paintings and a few works from the Atlanta run earlier this year. They are, in a real sense, asking to be seen by the city that shaped them.
For Umbach, play is not escapism. It is repair — a deliberate return to wonder after years shaped by grief, control, and survival. His canvases are populated with butterflies, bees, goldfish, sailboats, and blooms: subjects rendered with near-photographic fidelity, then surrounded by gestural marks made with his non-dominant hand. The innocent thing, held alongside everything that can no longer be contained. Naïve markings beside sophisticated compositions. Scribbles interrupting carefully balanced space.
The exhibition includes Three Blooms, Bee Blooms, Old Glory, and more. Three Blooms is its central statement: three forms rendered with photorealistic care, set against grounds of loosely gestural marks that press in from the edges — abundance and restraint in the same frame. Bee Blooms pairs bees of exquisite precision against loose gestural grounds. Old Glory brings Umbach's tenderness to the familiar, making the iconic feel personal again. The Goldie series, a single goldfish in fields of hot magenta, offers the room's quietest moment.
Collectors who have followed Umbach's practice from its early appearances in the Hamptons and Nantucket markets to his most recent international exhibitions will recognize in The Weight of Play the confident arrival of an artist who has found exactly what he came to say. For those discovering his work for the first time in Chicago: there is no better entry point.
There is something particular about seeing this show in Chicago versus anywhere else he has exhibited. In New York and Berlin and the Hamptons, his work arrived as a dispatch — made elsewhere, sent from somewhere else. Here, the postcards he redrew as a boy in this city, the masters at the Art Institute, the grandmother who believed in access — all of it echoes in the room. Collectors who know his practice will feel the difference. First-time viewers will feel it too, even if they can't name it.
All works are available upon inquiry. Visit carouselartgroup.com or stop by Carousel Fine Art, 230 W Superior St, Chicago, through November 8.
