BERLIN.- For his first solo show in Berlin, the American artist David Adamo has transformed the exhibition space into a completely new spatial scenario. Installed over the three main rooms of Mehringdamm 72, sticks of white drawing chalk are arranged in a herringbone pattern, forming a giant parquet-like floor. This dictates thereby a newly found rhythm to which Adamo's sculptures seem to dance and float.

The spectator is invited to enter this suggestive mise-en-scéne by walking on to the floor and by doing this, actively participate in its time-based bounded decay. As if left alone on a partially abandoned stage the visitor enters a sparse world of playfully manipulated familiar objects. An unexpectedly tiny radiator made of bee wax, a rescaled model of the prominent stucco ornament of Mehringdamm's central room fashioned of marzipan and a birdie cast in bronze make up the exhibition´s sculptural configuration which culminates in a dozen of clay hand painted erasers in the final room. The slippage of a sense from one substance or material to another is deliberately left ambiguous.

A sense of narrative runs throughout the whole exhibition, reality is slowly shunted towards absurdity. Adamo creates imagery with infinitely comic and slightly odd possibilities while his sculptures are intentionally open to a multiplicity of meaning and interpretations. This poetic installation combines seriousness and humor, effort and lightness, emotions and irony. Leitmotiv of his playful approach is a kind of performativity, as if the act of making was itself a performance, a staged choreography. It is as if his sculptures were the result of a performative, obsessive process, or as the artist says himself: I tend to think about my sculptures being more like performances, and my performances being more like sculptures.

David Adamo's work has been shown extensively in the USA and in Europe. In the past years he had, among others, shows at the Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Whitney Biennal at the Whitney Museum of America Art, Greater New York at MoMA P.S.1, New York, Kunstverein Bielefeld as well as Kunsthalle Fribourg, Switzerland.