Adam Gillam

Tintype is pleased to present In Constant Use, Adam Gillam’s third solo show at the gallery.

The title refers to the space in which Adam Gillam currently works – a garage awaiting conversion to a studio, and to his working methods. Change, evolution, and cannibalization are key to his practice. Gillam has a propensity for playful bricolage, imposing witty transformations on found materials.

Gillam adopts an improvised and what he terms a ‘fidgety’ approach to making. Utilitarian materials, discarded matter, drawings, notes and phrases are layered into wall-based pieces. This is particularly evident in the new photographic works presented in In Constant Use. Glimpses of the artist in his studio in the act of taking a photograph, are overlaid with magic-marker squiggles, bits of coloured tape, a piece of fabric with a fragment of a drawing taped over the top. Gillam refers to them as arrangements that are realised through the camera.

The word sampling, used in terms of music, seems appropriate – Gillam offers the very process of making as the artwork itself. The photographic works present a record of changes, erasures, decisions.

In Constant Use also features wall-based pieces that are a hybrid of painting and object. Often made of irregularly shaped pieces of wood or board, Gillam builds up the surfaces with jesmonite and hessian, and paints them using oilpaint and household gloss. This creates a kind of sealed, textured skin with occasional additions – pieces of wire, webbing and wood, a scribbled word.

Adam Gillam lives and works in London.
Recent shows include More Gravy! 2019 – 20; Id for Abroad, 2019; Work, Work (co-curator), 2017 all at Tintype, London; I’m In The Garden, Foal Art, Ryde, Isle of Wight, curated by Joanne Hummel-Newel, 2017; The Order of Things, The Wilson, Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum, curated by Andrew Bick, Jonathan Parsons, and Katie Pratt, 2017; Abstract Apartment at Deborah House, London, 2015; Stop Bugging Me: Frame 1, Tintype, London 2015, Abstract Apartment at Deborah House, London, 2015; Conversations Around Marlow Moss curated by Andrew Bick & Katrin Blannin, &Model, Leeds, 2014; Ideal Paste, Tintype, London, 2013; This-Here-Now, curated by Julian Hughes Watts, noformat, London 2013; Curator’s Egg, Anthony Reynolds Gallery, 2012; Adam Gillam, Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell , Ancient & Modern, 2011; Melanchotopia, curated by Nicolaus Schafhausen and Anne-Claire Schmidt, Witte de With, Rotterdam 2011; Construction and its shadow, curated by Andrew Bick, Leeds City Art Gallery, 2011; (Z)Art curated by Jan Hoet, ABTArt Gallery, Stuttgart, 2010; Adam Gillam and Sara Mackillop, MOT International, London 2009; Cortez Arrives, Herbert Read Gallery 2009; Art is a cupboard, Keith Talent Gallery, London 2007; Wandering Rocks, Gimpel Fils 2006; The Way We Work Now, Camden Arts Centre 2005.