Adam saks - Visual Voodoo

ARoS is pleased to present the first major museum exhibition in Denmark of the young Danish painter, printmaker and ceramicist Adam Saks (b. 1974).

The exhibition includes a large number of the artist's colourful watercolours, some of which measure over five metres in length. In addition, a series of ceramic works will be shown that, with their motifs based in both fantasy and reality, continue the fantastic and imaginative narratives that are expressed in Adam Saks' works on paper. Adam Saks lives and works in Berlin. He graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen (1993-99) and Hochschule der Künste, Berlin (1996-97).

In his art, Adam Saks works with a special form of motif and image sampling, where he creates a series of new narratives by detaching image elements from their original context and reinserting them in different constellations. In the works at ARoS, Adam Saks has drawn his visual elements from both high and low culture. In particular, he has found inspiration in a series of photographs showing the tattoos that adorned the bodies of French convicts in the early 1900s. In the works, Adam Saks has 'sampled' the short, dramatic text passages of the tattoos with images of sailors, light women, violent animals, skulls and desolate, discordant landscapes. In doing so, he creates a dynamic, almost chaotic state that contrasts with the traditional transparent and fragile nature of watercolour.