Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition by the New York– based British artist Adam McEwen in Hong Kong comprising a cross-section of his work, including new paintings as well as sculptures made in graphite, a material with which he is closely linked. The will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in Asia.

McEwen’s practice tends to foreground and isolate banal objects—a yoga mat, a drinking fountain, plastic cups—to the degree that they become unstuck from their familiar, reassuring meanings. His sculptures in graphite or cast iron, for all intents and purposes straightforward and accurate renditions suggest a sense of the uncanny and a feeling of slight displacement.

Similarly, his recent paintings present everyday things in a simplified graphic language that decontextualizes them, freeing them from their usual connotations. The subjects are chosen for no other reason than that, for McEwen, they seem to hold some import: a railway arch near his studio, a drawing of a lion that symbolizes power and strength, a pair of street lamps near Grand Central Station in New York that forms a kind of entranceway, a sword found hidden behind a radiator when the artist renovated his apartment.

By simplifying their depiction, these subjects become accessible, and the relationship between the subject and the viewer becomes stronger and more charged than the one between the subject and its everyday meaning.

Adam McEwen was born in 1965 in London and lives and works in New York. Collections include the Arts Council Collection, London; Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums, Scotland; Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Germany; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut; Rollins Museum of Art, Winter Park, Florida; de la Cruz Collection, Miami; Rubell Museum, Miami; and Museo Jumex, Mexico City. Exhibitions include the Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas (2012); Museo Civico-Diocesano di Santa Maria dei Servi, Città della Pieve, Italy (2015); I Think I’m in Love, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2017); and 10, Feels Like 2, Lever House, New York (2019).