BUFFALO, N.Y. – The UB Anderson Gallery, at the University of Buffalo, is proud to present Bruce Adams, Half Life, 1980-2006,  the first comprehensive survey of over seventy paintings and works on paper. The exhibition is at the UB Anderson Gallery through 25 March, 2007.  The exhibition will be accompanied by a 64-page catalog with an essay by John Massier, Visual Arts Curator, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, and an interview by Sandra Firmin.  On Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 from 6:00pm to 9:00pm Bruce Adams will lead a workshop, Artist as Educator: Blank Canvas to Finished Product.  This workshop is open to educators, art educators, and college level art education students. The fee is $10.00 per person and pre-registration is required.

Known primarily as a figurative painter, Adams has wielded his brush in a variety of styles—from the expressionistic to photorealist—to generate a system of signs that exuberantly combine a variety of source materials, juxtaposing pulp cultural, archeological, technological, and art historical references.

Adams began his life as a professional artist in Buffalo in the early 1980s. Along with his contemporaries such as painters David Salle and Eric Fischl, as well photographers like Sherrie Levine and Louise Lawler, Adams used appropriation techniques during this period to critically evaluate societal structures and the role of governments, the media, and museums.

Adams’ Research and Development series (early to mid-1990s) is a culmination of ideas that he had been exploring throughout the 1980s. This series deals with representations of class, gender and ethnicity in relation to the ideal American citizen. Men at Work (1994-95) shows Leave-it-to-Beaver dads bent over varied objects—statues, vases, bombs, etc.—absorbed in what looks like scientific analysis or conservation. By placing pinup posters on the walls behind these men, Adams re-contextualizes the girlie magazines that are often found hidden underneath parent’s beds in countless suburban homes and offers a tongue-in-cheek commentary on sexual repression in the American nuclear family.

In the last series in the exhibition Paintings of Pictures of People with Paintings from the early 2000s, Adams, chameleon-like, employs a photorealist style to document people in museums looking at paintings. Adams has removed all traces of architecture, allowing the people and paintings to co-exist in white expanses, highlighting the dynamic between audiences and artwork.

Bruce Adams received his B.S. (1976) and M.A (1983) in art education from the State University College at Buffalo. He has been an art instructor in elementary and High Schools in the Tonawanda region for over twenty-five years, and returned to his alma mater as an adjunct professor from 1991-1994. Adams has shown extensively in the region at Big Orbit, Upton Hall, and the Burchfield-Penney Art Center. His work is featured in numerous public and private collections.

Among his many honors, Adams was awarded the Citibank Award at the 41st WNY Exhibition at Albright Knox Art Gallery as well as the Benjamens Gallery Award at the 42nd WNY Exhibition.

UB Anderson Gallery, located on Martha Jackson Place near Englewood and Kenmore, is open Wednesday through Saturday 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. and Sunday 1-5 p.m. The exhibition is free and open to the public and is on view from February 9 –March 25, 2007. UB Anderson Gallery is supported with funds from the Office of the Provost, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Anderson Gallery Program Fund and the UB Collection Care and Management Endowment Fund. Visit : ubartgalleries.buffalo.edu/