Adam Sorensen, Places

We are proud to announce Places, an exhibition of new landscape oil paintings by Adam Sorensen.

Adam Sorensen presents us with a subject that is both familiar and delightfully new, pulling freely from diverse sources like Japanese woodblock prints, television and animation aesthetics, the Hudson River School, and painters of the American West.

Characterizing his work as “psychedelic landscapes” Sorensen uses brilliant color, exaggerated rock formations and dramatic skies to describe an other-worldly place. While they don’t carry a specific narrative, his topographies are charged with possibility. These still, quiet spaces are elastic, one moment implying distant, pristine utopias and in the next regions marked by a more sinister sort of absence.

Sorensen's richly detailed work is captivating. He paints beautifully and with tremendous skill. He is the first to say, however, that he is less concerned with chasing realism and more interested in filling his work with emotional weight. With deliberate color relationships he both attracts and confounds in the same picture plane. These contrasts and complements elicit duel (sometimes dueling) feelings of exuberance and longing. This tension is the heart of Sorensen's work.

Adam Sorensen lives and works in Portland, OR. He received a BFA from Alfred University in New York and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in painting from the Studio Art International, Florence, Italy. He had a solo exhibition in the Portland Art Museum’s APEX space, created album art for indie band Ages and Ages, and his work is in the collections of the Tacoma Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Boise Art Museum, Westfalisches Industriemuseum, Glashutte Gernheim, Germany, The CW, Los Angeles, CA as well as prominent private collections up and down the West Coast.

Sorensen recently completed a fifteen foot commission for the US State Department, American Institute in Taiwan.