NADA NY 2022

Adam de Boer: One Spring Day
May 5 - 8, 2022

Booth 4.11

Pier 36, 299 South St., New York City, 10002


Hunter Shaw Fine Art is pleased to participate in NADA NY 2022 with a solo presentation by Los Angeles based artist Adam de Boer. This will be the artist’s first exhibition of new work in the United States since receiving the 2021 Joan Mitchell Fellowship. The presentation will feature a suite of batik cityscapes showcasing de Boer’s unique blend of traditional Indonesian crafts and Western modes of oil painting. 

Over the past decade, Adam de Boer has intermittently lived and worked in Java, researching his family’s Dutch-Indonesian ancestry, while apprenticing with master craftspeople and cultivating a deep relationship with the techniques and materials indigenous to the area of his family’s origin. In particular, the artist has studied prehistoric wax-resist batik fabric dyeing techniques, pushing the aesthetics of the craft beyond its traditional boundaries. De Boer’s recent batiks engage the art historical tradition of Genre Painting, depicting anonymous figures in fleeting scenes of city life. Resonating with the mythology of Los Angeles, these images oscillate between illusion and reality, capturing the urban environment bathed in the city’s iconic light at various times of day. Showcasing the artist’s sophistication as a draftsman and colorist, the wide-angle compositions and saturated palette imbue these paintings with a highly cinematic quality, while their detached perspectives afford a documentary-like neutrality. Drawing connections between the landscape and the figures that inhabit it, de Boer infuses observational landscape painting with a subtle social awareness. Utilizing a prehistoric technique to portray the visual textures, cultural minglings, and socioeconomic realities of Downtown and the eastside of Los Angeles, where the artist lives and works, de Boer has adapted batik to the visual lexicon of present day LA, generating images befitting the cultural hodge-podge of this particular setting while maintaining a strong connection to his own immigrant heritage.

Adam de Boer was born in Redlands, CA and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. The artist received an MA from Chelsea College of Art, London (2012), in addition to a BA from College of Creative Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara (2006). In 2017, the artist received a Fulbright Research Fellowship to study indigenous crafts in Indonesia. In 2021, de Boer was awarded a Joan Mitchell Fellowship. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Jalan-Jalan, Taymour Grahne Projects, London, UK (2022); Facing New Axes with Tammy Nguyen, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles (2020); Traveller’s Palm, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles (2018); Legacies Real and Imagined with Jumaldi Alfi, PT Jakarta Land and ISA Art Advisory, Jakarta, Indonesia (2018); Jungle Flame, Redbase Foundation, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2017); and Night Swimming, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles (2016).