Adam McEwen

Adam McEwen was born in London in 1965 and lives and works in New York. He studied at Christ Church, Oxford, where he received a B.A. in 1987, before going on to earn a B.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1991. Working across sculpture, painting, and text-based practice, McEwen has developed a body of work that consistently interrogates the familiar — transforming everyday objects, language, and cultural detritus into unsettling, often monochromatic forms that resist easy categorization.

Among the works that anchor his practice, Untitled (Rod) (2004) exemplifies his early engagement with graphite sculpture, in which a recognizable utilitarian object is rendered life-size in dense, uniform material, stripping it of function while amplifying its physical presence. Untitled Text Msg. [Jerry] (2008), held in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, extends this sensibility into the realm of language and digital communication, treating the ephemeral text message as a site of cultural and emotional instability. The Spectator described his output in 2025 as comprising "small masterpieces of the uncanny" — a phrase that captures the quiet disorientation his work tends to produce.

McEwen's exhibition history spans major institutions and galleries across Europe, North America, and beyond. Solo presentations have been mounted at Gagosian in New York, London, Beverly Hills, and Rome; at Petzel in New York; at The Modern Institute in Glasgow; and at Galerie Art: Concept in Paris, among many others. Institutional group exhibitions have included Greater New York at MoMA PS1 (2015), America is Hard to See at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015), Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2010), and Accrochage n°3: Pop et Musique at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2015). His work is held in prominent collections including the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, the de la Cruz Collection in Miami, the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf, the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, and the University of Kentucky Art Museum in Lexington. He is currently represented primarily by Gagosian, with secondary representation through Galerie Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels and The Modern Institute in Glasgow.