Todd Norsten: The Future The Past

Todd Norsten: THE FUTURE THE PAST
February 10–March 11, 2017

Adams and Ollman is pleased to announce an exhibition titled THE FUTURE THE PAST with the artist Todd Norsten. The exhibition will feature new paintings on canvas, as well as painting and collage works on paper and will be on view February 10 through March 11, 2017. This is the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Norsten's small-scale works on view at Adams and Ollman acknowledge the structure and history of paint and painting. Sampling liberally from historic techniques, such as trompe l’oeil, while also incorporating stenciling, flat surfaces and evocative brushstrokes, the paintings, which reflect Norsten's technically brilliant hand, feel collaged and fragmentary in a way that directly acknowledges that these canvases are about painting itself.

Norsten transforms vernacular images experienced throughout his travels—billboards, hand-lettered signs, and bathroom graffiti—into a meditation on the universal impulse to make art. Removed from their context, snippets of words, shapes and colors are transformed from their literal representation into something surprising, poetic and perhaps absurd. Norsten's to-the-point phrases—“The Wages of Sin Are Cheaper Everyday," "Highly Touted," or "Willing to Half Ass It”—are set against abstract fields of lush paint-for-paint’s-sake that speaks equally to modernist traditions as to faded paint on the side of a barn in Nebraska.

Todd Norsten was born in Minnesota in 1967 where he continues to live and work. He has exhibited at galleries and museums in the United States, Europe and Asia and was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Selected solo and group exhibitions include Federica Schiavo Gallery and Fondazione Giuliani, both in Rome, Italy; Dayton Art Institute, OH; Leo Koenig, Inc. and Cohan and Leslie, both in New York, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Walker Art Center, and Midway Contemporary Art, all in Minneapolis, MN. His work is in the collections of the British Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center, as well as numerous private collections.