The Weight of Play: Adam Umbach

"Some paintings ask you to look. Adam Umbach's paintings ask you to remember."
The Exhibition

In The Weight of Play, his first solo exhibition in Atlanta, Brooklyn-based artist Adam Umbach brings a body of paintings to Carousel Fine Art that quietly dismantles the distance between technical mastery and emotional honesty.

The title carries a deliberate tension. Play suggests lightness, childhood, spontaneity. Weight suggests consequence, memory, the body's effort. Together, the phrase names what Umbach's paintings are actually doing: restoring serious attention to the objects and moments that shaped a life.

The works span Umbach's signature subjects: rubber ducks, toy sailboats, butterflies, coastal water; all rendered with a technical rigor that then gives way, on the same canvas, to gestural marks that read almost like handwriting. The result is a body of work that feels simultaneously intimate and accomplished, personal and painterly.

These are not nostalgic paintings. They are paintings that examine nostalgia carefully, and then push through it toward something more honest.
Preview The Collection
- Adam Umbach, Sweet Smells (Emerald), 2026
- Adam Umbach, Sweet Smells (Yellow Cake), 2026
- Adam Umbach, Goldie (Light Pink), 2025
- Adam Umbach, Goldie (Pink Pink), 2025
Availability is limited. Inquiries are welcomed through the gallery.

REQUEST FULL CHECKLIST
Work in Depth

Summer Drift No. 2
Oil on canvas · 2025
Among the exhibition is, Summer Drift No. 2. Adam places its central subject, a rubber duck rendered with the patience and precision of a Dutch still life, against a coastal palette of blues and pinks that he then works over with gestural marks that read as both wave and scrawl.

The surface is rich, but the composition directs attention back to the duck: isolated, floating, convincingly alone. What makes the painting compelling is not the technical accomplishment alone. It is the emotional pitch, the image holds loneliness and joy in exactly equal measure.

The marks around it create reflections in 'water,' or the accumulated residue of memory. This is the kind of painting that rewards sustained attention.

INQUIRE ABOUT THIS WORK

The Method

I

Photorealistic Precision

Umbach begins with his dominant hand, rendering everyday objects — rubber ducks, toy sailboats, butterflies — to photographic levels of precision.

Getting there requires patience, technical command.

II

The Switch

Having rendered the object with full precision, Umbach picks up the brush with his non-dominant hand and marks the canvas again. These marks — looser, less certain, more instinctive — are not corrections or accidents. They are the point.

The non-dominant hand has no pretense of control. It produces marks that recall a child's drawing, or handwriting, or the kind of mark a person makes when the usual rules are suspended.

III

The Argument

The marks do not simply surround the objects — they intrude, echo, and repeat formal elements of the central image.

The gestural and photorealistic modes are in active conversation. A viewer can follow the argument from one zone of the canvas to another: here, precision; here, release; here, the moment where one gives way to the other.

The Artist

Adam Umbach
Brooklyn-based painter

FORMATIVE YEARS

Umbach was born in Chicago in 1986. As a child, he was taken to the Art Institute of Chicago — an institution whose permanent collection moves between Old Masters and contemporary abstraction without apology. That early exposure planted a conviction: that precision and feeling were not opposites, and that the most controlled rendering and the most instinctive gesture could occupy the same canvas.

THE PERSONAL SUBJECT

Umbach lost his father at seventeen. The emotional weight of that loss — combined with the particular textures of growing up that preceded it — became the subject matter his painting has circled ever since. The toys and objects he paints are not chosen for visual complexity alone. They carry memory in the way objects do when someone important to you is gone. To paint them with photographic precision is an act of preservation. To then mark over them with the non-dominant hand is to admit that preservation is never complete.

MARKET HISTORY

Before establishing himself in Brooklyn, Umbach built a significant collector base through the Hamptons and Nantucket art markets. Works are held in private collections across the United States, Europe, South Korea, and internationally. The Weight of Playat Carousel Fine Art marks his first solo exhibition in Atlanta.
For Collectors

The Weight of Play is Umbach's Atlanta debut. Carousel Fine Art can facilitate introductions to the work and guide acquisition for first-time and experienced collectors alike.
Available Works by Adam Umbach
- Adam Umbach, Just Beachy, 2021
- Adam Umbach, Inundation, 2022