Adam Helms
Tucson (AZ), US, 1974 Works and lives in Brooklyn, New York
Adam Helms studied at Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University, New York. His work is part of international collections and has been exhibited in the past in, among others, Kunsthalle Wien, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and New Museum in New York and GRIMM in Amsterdam.
Adam Helms makes large-scale charcoal drawings of mythical landscapes, screen prints, drawings on paper and other media, installations and grid-like assemblages on light-boxes. He regards himself as an ethnographer who is interested in visual archetypes that refer to different historic periods and communities.
Helms makes use of (online) archival images and Western iconography in order to examine social and political identity. He also questions our attitude towards violence, and the link between the political past and present. By rearranging existing images, new perspectives on historic and contemporary events emerge.