Tenez—the French imperative for "take this" and the etymological root of tennis itself—takes the sport as its subject, examining the court, match dynamics, and the game's psychology and formal gestures. Featuring drawing, painting, sculpture, animation, documentary film, and graphic novels, this group exhibition is presented as part of Portland's citywide Art + Sport initiative. Tenez opens on July 9 with a reception from 5-7pm and will be on view through August 8, 2026.
Dan Attoe's (b. 1975, Bremerton, WA; lives and works in Washougal, WA) cinematic paintings feature awe-inspiring landscapes filled with natural wonders—epic mountains, towering trees, and waterfalls—and act as a stage for banal or insignificant human activity that disrupts the sublimity of nature. For Tenez, the artist uses a dramatically lit court as the setting, not for tennis, but for two young girls skateboarding—a nod to his daughters who learned to cruise around on their boards during the pandemic on their local courts in Washington State.
The archetypal figures of Katherine Bradford's (b. 1942, New York, NY; lives and works in New York, NY, and Brunswick, ME) paintings—mothers, dreamers, superheroes—are inextricable from their surroundings, as if dreamed to life by the bodies of water, night skies, or fields of color that surround them. The connection and contrast between figure and field offers hints of narrative, feeling, and private subjectivities that draw the viewer in to consider gender, politics, and sexuality, as well as color and form. In Rose Courts (2026), Bradford depicts four figures on a tennis court, a dream-like, psychologically charged moment against a Rothko-esque field of play.
Net To Catch Everything (2021), by Lenka Clayton (b. 1975, Cornwall, UK; lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA) and Phillip Andrew Lewis (b. 1973, Memphis, TN; lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA), originates from a visit the artists made to the last remaining traditional net-making facility in the United Kingdom. There, the artists encountered machines still tying strings of varying weights into nets designed to catch everything from chickens to pigeons to tennis balls. Clayton and Lewis have combined every style of net still manufactured at the Cornwall factory into a single work—one that could theoretically catch everything.
Melanie Flood (b. 1979, Queens, NY; lives and works in Portland, OR) employs photography as a tool for examining how femininity is constructed, commodified, and performed. For Tenez, Flood investigates the fashion of tennis—a sport long entangled with codes of class, whiteness, and a particular vision of feminine propriety. Zooming in on the white pleats of a tennis skirt, she strips the garment of its athletic function and reframes it as pure surface: a study in texture, geometry, and the labor of looking feminine.
Peter Gallo (b. 1959, Rutland, VT; lives and works in Hyde Park, VT) creates what critics have termed "grunge arte povera"—layered compositions across painting, collage, sculpture, and drawing that transform discarded materials into profound meditations on time, language, and the human condition. Utopia and Anguish (n.d.) consists of two hanging sculptural stars—a condensed political and metaphysical form. Stars promise orientation, transcendence, collective destiny; here, they are rendered provisional—stitched, frayed, visibly constructed. Utopia and anguish are not opposites but structurally intertwined and might suggest the various extreme mental states while on the court.
Restraint and precision characterize Kenji Ide's (b. 1981, Yokosuka, JP; lives and works in Tokyo, JP) carefully considered sculptural works. Various carved wood and found elements are positioned meticulously in relation to one another and call to mind models, toys, or puzzles, like stage sets of places that are both familiar and not. Beside the Beside (2026) considers tennis a metaphor for psychological interaction, depicting back-to-back courts where two different types of exchanges on similar terrain might exist side by side.
Bernie Kaminski (b. 1966, Harvey, IL; lives and works in New York, NY) discovered the medium of papier-mâché in 2016 when his daughter made a seahorse for a school art project. Ever since, he has been using this method to fashion playful sculptures based on everyday objects. Here he exhibits an oversized tennis bag replete with racket and balls.
Since the late 1990s, Paul Lee (b. 1974, London, UK; lives and works in New York, NY) has developed a practice that blurs the distinctions between sculpture, drawing, collage, and painting. Characterized by a palpable presence of the hand, his ongoing formal experimentation and investigation of materiality returns again and again to familiar functional objects, transforming the mundane into something closer to reliquary. For Tenez, Lee presents a new sculptural mobile suspended from the ceiling, assembling found wood, tennis balls, a sea sponge, a screen, pencil, and tambourine into a work that turns and shifts in visual balance. Liberated from the studio, these common or discarded materials become something else entirely—vessels for desire, failure, effort, and play.
Jeffry Mitchell (b. 1958, Seattle, WA; lives and works in Portland, OR) creates ceramic works that explore tensions between surface and depth, figuration and abstraction, legibility and opacity. His sculptures take the form of functional objects—a vessel, a table, a plate—heavily encrusted with flowers, figures, and flourishes that overwhelm and overtake the underlying structure. Familiar patterns and images camouflage coded details: fingers, holes, bits of language, accruing toward meanings that are personal, contradictory, and subversive. For the exhibition at Adams and Ollman, Mitchell has fashioned bookends with imagery drawn from the game of tennis—the net and two crocodiles, a nod to the iconic Lacoste logo, which was originally associated with country clubs and preppy sports, but later subversively co-opted by gay men.
Joshua Mosley (b. 1974, Dallas, TX; lives and works in Philadelphia, PA) uses stop motion animation to depict a fictional game of jeu de paume, a precursor to modern tennis, between Ferdinand Garcin and J.B. Gribble, set in 1907 at the Château de Fontainebleau in France. To create the animation, Mosley constructed a miniature reproduction of the Fontainebleau court as it stood before its renovation in 1990, and hand-fashioned puppets dressed in period clothing. The video employs irregular editing rhythms, shots that stray from the central gameplay, and floating, dancelike camera movements that capture, along with the players' actions, the slanting angles of the architecture, the play of sunlight, and the stark contrast of the white ball against the dark court. Acknowledging that the concentration of both player and spectator ebbs and flows over the course of a match, his camera similarly responds to this idiosyncratic focus and the particularities of the environment to capture a shifting sense of what the artist terms "human awareness."
Drawing inspiration from popular culture and observations of everyday life, Ralph Pugay (b. 1983 in Cavite, Philippines; lives and works in Portland, OR) creates raucous and irreverent drawings that ask the viewer to imagine a variety of pictorial "what-ifs." Pugay's propositions are the result of the artist's careful study of the human condition—particularly with regard to religion, specifically Catholicism, and history; his curiosity about contemporary culture as filtered through TikTok and other social media; and his critical engagement with ideas of class, race, gender, and queer culture. Popular trends, viral news stories, consumer fads, and all other manner of social phenomena are poignantly examined with great clarity and humor, locating moments of tension, humor, and poignancy in the collective unconscious. Pugay continues his interest in sport and play with a series of ink drawings featuring modern dancers with their bodies contorted over the tennis net (Tennis Court Dance Rehearsal #1 and #2) and Crawfish On A Racket (all 2026).
Conny Purtill's (b. 1969, Phoenix, AZ; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) masterful drawings can be read as notes or shorthand for emotions, energies, dynamics, and patterns that spring from the ground. Lines, glyph-like marks, and stylized forms seek out a deeper understanding of the connectedness of everything, as each explores the relationship between art and the space that surrounds it. Purtill's contribution to Tenez, a drawing on found paper, features a single playing card with two hearts—a deuce—in an ornate cardboard frame designed by the artist. The work is a nod to the similarities between how racket sports and card games overlap—mental fortitude, precision, chance, and luck—as well as shared terminology such as "deuce," a 40-40 score, or "grand slam," a term that originated in the card game Bridge, but is also used when a player wins all four major tennis tournaments in a single year.
Also on view in Tenez will be Open Score by Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925, Port Arthur, TX; d. 2008, Captiva, FL), the documentary by Barbro Schultz Lundestam and Julie Martin made from archival footage and sound from Rauschenberg's performance of the same name. Originally performed as part of the 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering in 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, Open Score began with Frank Stella playing tennis using a wired racket that emitted an amplified sound each time the ball struck the strings, also triggering one of the lights around the Armory to be switched off. Once the space was completely dark, 300 performers entered; their movements, invisible to the live audience, were captured by infrared cameras and projected onto three large screens hung in front of the audience. For the second performance Rauschenberg added a third act, in which he carried Simone Forti in a burlap sack and put her down at different places on the Armory floor as she sang an Italian love song. The performance turned on a provocative paradox, one Rauschenberg described in his own words:
“Tennis is movement, put it in the context of theatre it is a formal dance improvisation. The unlikely use of the game to control the lights and to perform as an orchestra interests me. The conflict is not being able to see an event that is taking place right in front of one except through a reproduction is the sort of double exposure of action. A screen of light and a screen of darkness.”
The Prince of Tennis is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Takeshi Konomi. The manga chapters were collected in 42 tankōbon volumes which will be on view at Adams and Ollman and available for visitors to read. |
|
Jeffry Mitchell
