The Weight of Play Homecoming: Adam Umbach Spotlight in Chicago

For Umbach, play is not escapism. It is repair. It is a deliberate return to wonder after years shaped by grief, control, and survival. 

 

Adam Umbach's artworks are populated with butterflies, bees, goldfish, sailboats, rubber ducks, and blooms — a personal iconography assembled across multiple bodies of work that has deepened, painting by painting, into something akin to a private language. He renders every subject with near-photographic fidelity, then creates gestural marks with his non-dominant hand in the background. The result is a structural tension that mirrors the emotional tension the work describes: the innocent thing, surrounded by everything that can no longer be contained.

 

Available works include Three Blooms, Bee Blooms, Old Glory, and more. On view through November 8, 2026.

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.