Artist: Derrick Adams

Gagosian presents Derrick Adams: The Strip, the artist’s debut exhibition in Korea. New work by Adams is presented in the headquarters of Amorepacific, the world-renowned Korean beauty company, in the center of Seoul, opening on September 3, 2024, alongside the third edition of the Frieze Seoul art fair. The exhibition is held in the APMA Cabinet, a project space on the ground floor of the David Chipperfield–designed building.

In this latest body of work, Adams paints a series of display windows at beauty supply stores that he photographs both near his Brooklyn studio and throughout the world. Transforming the compositions through his distinctive use of abstraction, he explores themes of style and beauty. Presenting groups of mannequin heads adorned with colorful wigs, the views of store windows are framed by molded reliefs of bricks—collaged, dimensional elements that contrast with the flatness of the paintings. Spray-painted hearts pay tribute to American fashion designer Patrick Kelly, whose exuberant and inclusive styles have long inspired the artist. The paintings are titled after classic tracks from the 1990s by women-fronted R&B groups including Brownstone, Destiny’s Child, Groove Theory, SWV, Total, and Xscape, whose femme styling and costuming remain influential.

The paintings vary in size and configuration, as does the placement of the depicted windows and groupings of heads and wigs, emulating street encounters with shop displays. Use Your Heart (SWV) (all works 2024) features three heads positioned in frontal and three-quarters views on a single shelf. Below them are the profiles of a hair dryer and product bottles with labels made of collaged fabric, conveying Adams’s interest in pattern and the application of readymade materials. In Can’t You See (Total) the textured brick and layered multicolor hearts bifurcate the painting into two separate windows, each containing two tiers of mannequin heads. Another divided panel, Luv Bad B**ches (Brownstone) includes on the left four heads in a pyramidal arrangement with a rainbow wig at its apex, juxtaposed with a single head with an elaborate polychrome hairstyle on the right. Framed on three sides by the applied brick relief and painted hearts, the “group portrait” Who Can I Run To (Xscape) pictures multiple heads with wigs in synthetic colors together with a video monitor, reinforcing the rectilinearity of the work’s support as well as its commercial imagery. This body of works marks the sophistication of Adams’s style, interpreting recognizable subjects into integrated compositions of vivid colors and abstract shapes.

Related to the Style Variation series that Adams initiated in 2019, each mannequin head is defined individually with a faceted geometry of color planes in an echo of Cubism and African masks. The heads relate as well to the history of both portraiture and adornment from ancient Egyptian and other traditions, while the wigs evoke mystique and carnivalesque transformation. Adams draws from the strategies of Pop art, considering commercial display, consumer products, identity, and desire. In addition, his experimental approach to the representation of Black urban life is inspired in part by artist Romare Bearden’s panoramic collage The Block (1971, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Derived from many locales, Adams’s subjects are Black women who embody the roles of both consumer and muse. Their engagement with various forms of costuming is cross-cultural—often the prototype for how the transformation of appearance expresses style, attitude, and individualism.