John Adelman

Conceptual artist and draughtsman John Adelman sets stringent rules for the production of his works, limiting himself to black or blue gel ink and mark-marking programs, such as working exclusively from left to right, or top to bottom. His drawings are extremely labor-intensive and reveal themselves to the artist as he repeatedly applies his marks. Adelman’s method probes the tension between the impersonal conditions of his work’s production and the personal experiences they are capable of creating for the spectator, and recall the work of 1960s Minimalist and process-driven, conceptual practices. To create Nail Cluster (2006), he introduced elements of chance, such as dropping small nails onto a page, then outlining them exactly where they fell.