LONDON.-The Elms Lesters Painting Rooms will present The Adam and Ron Show, on view May 2-31, 2008. When Adam Neate was still an unknown artist leaving his painted cardboard works out on the street, he wrote to Ron English in New York to say how much he admired his work. For the first time, The Adam and Ron Show brings together these two urban art painters, both masters of their own style, in a major heavyweight show at the Elms Lesters Painting Rooms.
The exhibition will include a 50’ site-specific painting by Ron English, recreating Picasso’s Guernica. Over the past few years, Ron has created dozens of versions of Picasso’s masterpiece, transforming the original Spanish civilian characters into Disney characters, Peanuts characters, soccer players, schoolchildren, and many others. As part of this series he painted the world's largest version of Guernica at the Station Museum in Houston, being one foot longer and one foot wider than Picasso's original and featuring schoolchildren playacting the violent scene of the original.
Adam Neate is a fearless painter who is constantly experimenting with styles and techniques, and continually pushing forward with his work. Paintings selected for this forthcoming show will demonstrate how he is mastering the mediums of both cardboard and canvas, with complex layering and bold use of paint. As well as a series of his coveted self portraits, the show will include a collection of his narrative, social documentary paintings. His fluid brush strokes, and impeccable line are apparent in both his two dimensional pieces and his multi-layered three dimensional works.
Adam Neate’s extraordinary development in the past 12 months has not gone unnoticed by international collectors, and his works are contended by major collectors and celebrities and lauded by international critics. Neate’s work has recently sold impressively at both Sotheby’s and Bonham’s auction houses, exceeding original estimates up to tenfold.
Adam Neate – Adam Neate first came to the public’s attention by bounteously leaving thousands of his paintings on the street of London, for people to take, or leave, at will. Since then he has rapidly become Britain's most exciting young artist and a much heralded painter at the forefront of a radical new movement in contemporary art. Whilst the world is sitting up and taking notice of a host of emerging urban/ graffiti artists - Neate is a street artist with a difference. His work is technically expert and has won him acknowledgement from Tate, National Portrait Gallery and The National Gallery. Last August, Adam’s first one man show at Elms Lesters, the sell-out exhibition entitled Paintings. Pots and Prints demonstrated his masterful use of different materials, garnering global interest; Adam’s works have been included in major auctions of Contemporary and Urban Art in the past months. His gallery pieces, the majority of which are still painted on cardboard, have immediacy and a raw energy, through the use of aerosols, marker pens, and acrylic and gloss paints.
Ron English - Ron English first hijacked billboards when he was an art student as a way of displaying his art to as many people as possible – it was later that he realised he could make political statements by the same means. Since then Ron has ‘pirated’ or ‘liberated’ over one thousand billboards, replacing existing advertisements with his own hand-painted "subvertisements." getting his own socio-political messages across. He is recognised as the father of AGIT-POP, a hybrid of Pop Art that is fuelled by a more personal, hands-on socially responsible attitude. His gallery works on canvas contain an equally biting commentary whilst being flawlessly painted in a hyperreal style, loaded with the iconography of his generation. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide and his work is included in prominent collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Paris and the Whitney Museum in New York; few of them were also featured in Morgan Spurlock’s film ‘SUPER SIZE ME”. His film "POPaganda: The Art and Crimes of Ron English" was released in 2006.
