About Artist & Art Details

Harry Adams is the name of the artistic partnership between Steven Lowe and Adam Wood. The two artists have collaborated together in activities as diverse as music, painting, drawing, film, performance, printmaking, photography, digital montage and poster design (especially the Art Hate project, in collaboration with Billy Childish), artists’ books, publishing (poetry, novels, polemics), web projects, running galleries and curating.

In recent years, their activity has focused on the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop, a gallery and workshop set up by Steven Lowe that provides a vehicle for Harry Adams and other artists, such as James Cauty, Jamie Reid and Billy Childish. L-13 has been described as a cooperative severance from the art world values of success, failure and authorial identity, achieved through a vast imaginative enterprise and resulting in a potent intensity of meanings.

Ideas of creation and destruction are central to Harry Adams’s paintings, where there is belief and disbelief, beauty and ugliness, order and disorder, dirt and cleanliness, and ecstasy and dysphoria. He summons and combines these polarities as dualities or paradoxes of discord and unity and then evades tidy meanings or deliberately misplaces conclusions. Huge architectural monoliths are depicted, whose important survival or cultural functions, as repositories, have their already complex meanings disrupted in further ambiguities of the moral scale.