BUFFALO, NY.- A new exhibition of the work of Rochester-born, Berlin-based sculptor David Adamo (American, born 1979) will open at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery on January 22. It will be the artist’s first American solo museum exhibition. Among the many new works on view will be a group of sculptures Adamo created for the show while working in a temporary studio space in Rochester over the last few months. Adamo’s homecoming to Western New York will continue in Buffalo as he installs his work in the AK’s Gallery for Small Sculpture and Sculpture Court.

Organized in collaboration with the artist by Curator Cathleen Chaffee, the exhibition at the AK will offer visitors the first-ever opportunity to see so many of Adamo’s works in one space.

Adamo is known for hand-carving lyrical and formally elegant abstract sculptures from roughly hewn cedar. On one level, these freely reference the modernist sculptural canon, sometimes subtly echoing abstractions by Jean Arp (French, born Germany, 1886–1966) or the wood bases that Constantin Brancusi (French, born Romania, 1876–1957) crafted for his sculptures. But Adamo’s carvings also reveal the artist’s fascination with the accidental and even surreal “sculptures” he observes in nature, such as trees gnawed by beavers, stumps hollowed by woodpeckers, and earth mounded by termites.

Alongside such carvings, Adamo creates labor-intensive, realistic sculptures that can resemble everyday objects. There is humor and also poetry in these miniature works. With Adamo’s M&M candies made of bronze, or green packing peanuts meticulously modeled in ceramic and painted, tiny things are made monumental and trash is found to be precious.

Adamo recently said, “When taken together, my work can be seen as a meditation on sculpture in all of its different classes, sizes, scales, approaches, and materials. The sculptures point to the incredibly diverse ways these things can be manipulated and transformed to create a story.”

Speaking about the exhibition at the AK, Chaffee has said, “Even those who are very familiar with Adamo’s work will never have seen this many of his small sculptures in one place. And bringing them together alongside his larger works will allow viewers to make connections and discoveries they wouldn’t otherwise have made. Each sculpture is part of a story. Whether it is a bronze cast of an orange peel, a perfectly glazed plaster cookie, or a twelve-foot-tall spiraling cedar totem—something has inevitably been lost, consumed, or removed in the making of these artworks. Nearly everything on view in this show comes ‘after’: after the party is over, after the balloon has half-deflated, after the drawing has been erased. The real subject of Adamo’s work here seems to be discovering work—and finding a way to make work—from what remains.”

Adamo’s installation at the AK will create unexpected and even delightful juxtapositions between the artist’s large-scale and small sculptures in an installation that will sometimes also feel, as Chaffee has described, “like its own aftermath.”

David Adamo was born in Rochester, New York, in 1979. His work has been widely exhibited in the United States and Europe. He currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.