Weekend DO: Hemphill Fine Arts & Adamson Galleries, DC

Looking to come in from the cold this weekend? Warm up with these two gallery shows in DC…

Divinely surreal, exquisitely real. The abstract and hyper-real rub shoulders at the Hemphill Fine Arts and Adamson Galleries on 14th street in Washington, DC. The work is uncannily complimentary, even when not necessarily intended. Stepping off the freight elevator and through the doors of Hemphill Fine Arts Gallery, the work of Colby Caldwell immediately transfixes. The show, titled “How to Survive Your Own Death”, juxtaposes psychedelic digital prints blooming with color, light and abstraction, with the reality of nature, of feathers and nests and birds whose souls have departed. Recorded onto canvas for eternity (or, at least as long as the canvas manages to survive), the viewer is left to wonder if indeed these expired beings have made good on the show’s title, which is borrowed from a poem by Bernard Welt. Viewing these works that are at once vibrating with color and admittedly dark, the reality sinks in that our art has the potential to outlast us, a recording of our here and now to carry our fingerprints and ideas through history.

Down the hall at Adamson Gallery, a different show awaits — Elemental Perspectives: Land, Sea + Sky — unrelated, yet perfectly complimentary to the work at Hemphill. Here, the work of four artists — Robert Longo, Renate Aller, Carolyn Marks Blackwood and Martin Usborne — combine the abstract beauties of nature, of land, sea, sky and being. Deeply hued photographs nudge up against their black and white counterparts, waves dance against forest, sky with fauna. Life in all its forms in two adjacent spaces, a worthwhile visit on a cold and blustery winter’s day, when the colors of summer feel too far away.

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To visit:

Hemphill Fine Arts Gallery & Adamson Gallery 1515 14th St NW, Washington, DC 20005

Both open Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 5pm.

+ Another DC must-see

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7 years ago

I love arts and i liked too much the last picture.

I wanna go to Adamson Galleries.