The Weight of Play: Chicago Art Exhibition: Adam Umbach's Homecoming
The Weight of Play Comes Home
Adam Umbach was born in Chicago. As a boy in this city, painting gave him a place to put feelings he had no other language for. After he lost both parents, he left: first for Wisconsin, then Maine, East Hampton, and Brooklyn.
The Weight of Play opened at Carousel Fine Art's Lenox Square gallery in Atlanta this past spring. On October 8, it arrives at Carousel Fine Art Chicago, the gallery's River North location, for its second stop, and its most personal one. This is the city where Umbach's story starts, and where a new body of paintings now brings it back.
Two Truths in One Title
The Weight of Play holds two ideas at once. One is gravity: the work it takes to let yourself play again after a childhood that did not allow much of it. The other is lightness: soft, naive marks, colors that seem lit from within, edges that move freely instead of following rules.
How He Paints
Umbach paints with both hands, literally. He builds each composition first with his dominant right hand, rendering his subjects with photorealistic precision. Then he sets that brush down, picks up another with his left, and adds marks that are loose and unplanned: loops, scrawls, a kind of handwriting with nowhere to go. One hand knows exactly what it is doing. The other is finding out.
The Artist
Adam Umbach (b. Chicago, 1986) grew up in a turbulent home in the city he now returns to for The Weight of Play. He lost his father at seventeen. He lost his mother years later, under circumstances no child, grown or otherwise, should carry. What Umbach built from those losses was not cynicism, but color. Not bitterness, but bees and butterflies, goldfish and sailboats, rubber ducks and blooms. These are not naive choices. They are deliberate ones.
He has exhibited at Art Miami, Moniker Art Fair, Market: Art & Design in the Hamptons, Cavalier Ebanks in Nantucket, and JR Gallery in Berlin. His work has been featured in Elle Decor and Hamptons Magazine, and he has exhibited at Art Miami, Moniker Art Fair, and Market: Art & Design in the Hamptons. Solo exhibitions include Never Grow Up and Bloom Baby Bloom at Cavalier Galleries, Chelsea; Finding Home at Carver Hill Gallery, Maine; and a recent solo show at JR Gallery in Berlin.
In This Exhibition
The Weight of Play brings together new paintings in oil, acrylic, enamel, and oil stick on panel and canvas. Umbach returns to the same motifs across different color grounds, and each variation carries its own mood and its own quality of light.
Exhibition Opening Reception Details
Opening reception: Thursday, October 8, 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM CST
Location: Carousel Fine Art Chicago, 230 W Superior Street, Chicago, IL 60654, in the heart of the River North gallery district.
Explore More From Carousel Fine Art
- Meet Adam Umbach: the artist's full profile and available works.
- "7 Things That Make Adam Umbach One of the Most Interesting Painters Working in America Right Now": Carousel's feature on his practice and path.
- Carousel Fine Art Chicago: hours, location, and what else is on view at the River North gallery.
- All Exhibitions: the full calendar of shows across Carousel's four galleries.
