Abstract Paintings with Real Power
GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED AUGUST 14, 1999
Adamson’s painted tapestries of squares and rectangles cozying up to one another and fastened there by tiny plushy wads of pure pigment -which act like painterly push pins- may have begun as homage tp Hans Hoffmans stirring push pull abstractions of the 1950s. If so, they have proceeded to lead ahead from their ancestry. Adamson is a terrific colourist and knows extraordinarily well how to get paint onto a canvas. The sheer bravado of his pale cold mint greens, cool pinks, hot tar like blacks and searing reds pulled and swiped and stumbled into his teetering grids is a great pleasure to encounter. And the way Adamson works the pigment so that its loaded with complexity while maintaining a basic simplicity of presence is terrific. Here is a young painter seriously worth watching. $700-$7,000.Until Aug. 28. 33 Hazelton Ave., Toronto, 416-920-3820
Michael Adamson at Clarence Square
GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED MARCH 25, 2000
Toronto-based Michael Adamson is a fiercely independent artist -- and, despite his youth, remarkably accomplished. He appears to care very little indeed about what's in and what's out. His exquisite paintings clearly show the painter's untroubled internalizing of now distinctly unfashionable influences -- of, for example, New York ab-ex painter Hans Hofmann, Danish expressionist painter Asger Jorn, and, of all people, dauby School of Paris painter Nicolas de Stael. So profoundly does he dislike the gallery system and its dealers, he has set up his own gallery -- in a Victorian rowhouse at the foot of Toronto's Spadina Avenue ("I like painting, I like showing, I like getting paid"), where, since last fall, he's mounted serial shows. The current exhibition is titled Platform; his next, Concrete, opens on June 30. Adamson's paintings are slow and enormously complex. They seem to begin as grids ("The weft and weave of the canvas is a grid," Adamson points out, "and so are the verticals and horizontals of the stretcher"), which provide the basis for the painter's endless and jubilant piling up and scraping away of his oil pigments -- to the point where the colour sometimes grows so complex, any square inch of canvas would be a satisfying work on its own. If Adamson has a painterly signature, it takes the form of little buttons, nipples, points and disks of bright paint added -- like wax seals or painterly push-pins -- to the canvas to pin down otherwise vagrant planes of colour. The best way to view an Adamson is from about a foot away. Then what you see is a whole bright universe of hue. $300-$8,000. Until April 5. 14 Clarence Sq. , Suite 3. 416-204-9440. -Gary Michael Dault
Concrete
GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED AUGUST 5, 2000
Toronto-based painter Michael Adamson, who, by the way, was a classmate of Dougal Graham and Sawan Yawnghwe at Emily Carr, has developed his own kind of guerrilla gallery. Rather than undergo the oedipal rigours of having a dealer, he prefers to rent a vacant space and move in for the duration of each of his exhibitions. Adamson's latest manifestation of his prodigious abilities as a painter is called Concrete, and spreads throughout an otherwise unused space on Scollard Street. It even overflows into the gallery's back yard, where the tireless Adamson, when he isn't minding the store, paints endless new abstract paintings en plein air. A skillful manipulator of brilliantly hued planes of pigment, often fixed in place with bright, button-like daubs of paint (like wax seals on an envelope), Adamson has created more orderly works here, with grids and sharply defined fields of singing colour reminiscent of plots of land seen from the air. Sometimes, as in the handsome French Canada, they are surmounted by a broad luxuriously painted tumble of deep, sky-like blue. Other times, as in the bountiful Lawniacs, they are made by juxtaposing two discrete theatres of activity, a square and a rectangle, the ordering fields of colour disturbed here and there by "disasters" -- tumour-like coagulations of pigment, unintegrated into the succulent remainder of the painting. They are oases of pure painterly anxiety in an otherwise halcyon universe. $200-$4,900. Until Aug. 28. 107 Scollard St., Toronto. 416-204-9440 or 416-962-7057.
Revolver Contemporary Arts
GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED APRIL 7, 2001
Opens today and runs to April 28, Tues. to Sat., 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Revolver, 112 Scollard St., 416-963-3131.
After mounting a diverting series of exhibitions of his own paintings in various rented gallery-spaces around town, painter Michael Adamson has now established a permanent gallery -- called Revolver -- to show the work of other artists he believes in. His inaugural show is a splendid selection of paintings by the young Toronto-based artist Michael Murphy, the positively succulent oil and encaustic (pigmented wax) surfaces of which support ropes and skeins and webs of a putty-coloured, antique-looking pigment -- which look dashingly au courant and, at the same time, as venerable as old lace.
Thundering across the spectrum
GARY MICHAEL DAULT
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 1, 2001
Toronto wunderkind painter Michael Adamson calls his new exhibition Thunder. It's an apt title, given the way his paintings, exuberant and aching from pigment-joy, billow and rumble through some chromatic equivalent to heavy weather.
Thunder, opening today at Toronto's Moore Gallery,offers the most assured paintings of Adamson's brief but meteoric career (he graduated from Vancouver's Emily Carr College of Art and Design, after a year off to study in Germany, in 1997). They range from the epic-scaled The Last Easter Egg Hunt, a four-panel painting 16 feet long, to exquisite little works a few feet square (the little ones being no less absorbing and, if anything, more deliciously inspectable than the big ones; some of the best Adamsons I know are the size of playing cards).
In between is a suite of mid-size paintings embodying what is, for Adamson, a new format: thin lattices of pigmented rectangles linked loosely but determinedly across vast seas of painted ground -- a deep medieval gold ground, in the case of the splendid Looking for Yellow Hat, and grounds of creamy bone-whites and yellows in pictures like Ivory Network and White Bare Woods.
At a time when painters are turning themselves inside-out to reinvigorate an aging genre with an often merely strident newness, Adamson, by contrast, works nonchalantly toward originality by means of his big bearish embrace of the painterly past. Part of the appeal of Adamson's paintings, for me, lies in their open, grateful acknowledgment of the achievements of European modernism -- and of the European painters who emigrated to New York in the 1930s and 40s: painters like Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko and especially Hans Hofmann (see, for example Adamson's Boat of Gold). There are also, folded into the mix, dashes of largely forgotten Europeans like Nicolas de Stael. Even Oskar Kokoschka has a voice here. Adamson's radiant paintings live in an eternal present, art-historically speaking.
As freely as he allows what critic Harold Bloom once called "the anxiety of influence" to quicken his paintings, Adamson also opens himself profitably to the vivid cross-fertilizations that result from his mixing -- or art least allowing the mixing -- of figuration and abstraction. There are, for example, discernable horizon lines everywhere. And, if you look for them, configurations that can be construed, if you wish, as skies and seas, plains and boulders, maps, buildings. One of the undeniable masterworks of the exhibition is a painting called Picnic at Victoria Falls. Here, in this lush, remarkably complex work, the colour is piled, smeared, swiped and scraped into a conflagration of painterly eventfulness that even provides, if you enjoy finding them there, a passage of whirling green rapids and a persuasive waterfall. One musn't, I think, go deliberately looking for incidents like these in order to cling to them as a realist crutch. But to draw upon them as freely, as inventively, and fearlessly as Adamson does greatly deepens and enriches the experience of his art. $600-$10,000. Until Dec. 22, 80 Spadina Ave., Suite 404, Toronto; 416-504-3914.
Visual Artists: To Watch
GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 26, 2000
MICHAEL ADAMSON: Art between real and abstract To watch this young Toronto painter tend his burgeoning career is almost as much fun as looking at his paintings.
Unwilling to wait for dealers to catch up with him, Adamson rents temporary spaces in the city and mounts guerrilla shows of work so new it's often still wet. His paintings are gloriously rich in hue, with the pigment piled up and smeared about like icing on a cake.
Not the least of his accomplishments is to make paintings that hover so tantalizingly between abstraction and landscape that you end up unwilling to settle for any single reading.
The art of small-scale
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED JULY 13, 2002
Michael Adamson at Revolver Toronto painter Michael Adamson's new exhibition is called Station Logic. It's an important exhibition because it shows Adamson in the process of breaking out of a painting format he has used with remarkable success over the past few years -- canvases pushed and pulled with pulsing squares and rectangles of succulent colour, pinned there with stripes and bands and button-like, nipple-like knobs of pigment you can't keep your fingers from stroking.
But the new work is dissolving the earlier formats, melting them down into luscious overall fields of colour and gesture you can get lost in. The new work, Adamson says, openly owes something to other painters he admires. "I have seen some paintings in the last year that have made me stop and get all quiet," Adamson writes in a gallery statement, citing work by painters such as Elizabeth McIntosh, Jay Isaac, Jordan Broadworth, Peter Doig and the late, great Jean-Paul Riopelle. But Adamson also derives an untrammelled and unembarrassed joy from certain painters of the past. His magnificent new Isthmus of Christmas -- a glorious, assured melange of pinks and greens and turquoises, burnt oranges and navy-blue gesturings -- posits Pierre Bonnard as its godfather. And why not? $350-$9000. Until July 31. 112 Scollard St. 416-963-3131.
Raw Elegy
GARY MICHAEL DAULT
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 13, 2003
Toronto painter Michael Adamson doesn't have an axe to grind, doesn't have anything to exorcise or expiate, the way Susanna Heller does. Rather, he is concerned -- indeed obsessed -- with the problems of painting from the inside out, rather than, like Heller, from the outside in. Which is fine. Which is, in fact, glorious, in Adamson's skilled hands. The odd thing about Adamson's career to date, though, is that he's such a relentless provider of visual pleasure (and he sells so damned briskly!), that he ends by alienating certain otherwise serious art viewers who have trouble, I suspect, coming to terms with Adamson's unswerving joy. For this new exhibition, Blocks and Counterblocks, he has more or less taken a leave-of-absence from his tried-and-true, blocky, structured paintings of the past (the compositions held in place by his trademark buttons or nipples of thick pigment), and gone wailing straight into a voluptuous, if unfashionable neo-impressionism or maybe neo-post-impressionism (so as to include Pierre Bonnard in the mix). These big, pigment-suffused paintings, shimmering with the trapped and reflected light that a generous use of white can generate, are so chromatically complex that to describe them here would lead us into a bristling thicket of adjectives from which there'd be no escape. Each of these masterful paintings is an encyclopedia of painterly effects, ploys, conundra, and entanglements, each more dazzling than the one before. My favourite way of coming to terms with their complexity is to try to explore just a few inches of each painting at a time. This may be an impure approach to them, but, given Adamson's teeming inventiveness, it's a way of keeping your bearings.
$650 -- $9,000. Until Dec. 20, 80 Spadina Ave., suite 404, Toronto; 416-504-3914.
REWIND
PUBLISHED IN CANADIAN ART MAGAZINE, SPRING 2004
In his exhibition at Torontos Moore Gallery, Michael Adamson included a considerable number of his evolving block paintings, but the real meaning of the show lay in Adamson’s big new neo-impressionist paintings, or, perhaps more accurately, his big new Neo-post impressionist paintings. I encountered a lot of resistance to the new Adamson’s: terms like self-indulgent, for example, tolled through the conversations I had with people I had with people who were far less enraptured than I was by Adamson’s painterly hedonism.
But it seemed then as it seems still, that, despite damsons almost arrogantly guileless statement (printed on his exhibition announcement) * I want to make beautiful things*- the paintings were not so much self-indulgent as they were ecstatically pursued, encyclopedic essays in the expressive possibilities of the language of paint.
And these possibilities—as wrangled into the paintings by an artist for whom Bonnard,Manet, Monet, Nicolas de Stael and Hans Hofmann are just as relevant and just as useful in the daily practice of painting as is the inevitable Gerhard Richter—were now being tumbled into the the gaping hopper the new works with a gleeful abandon that either furrows your brow of lifts your heart ,
But gleeful abandon is not quite right. Or at least abandon isn’t. In overview, the paintings teem with pigment joy. You end up marvelling at the cunning wayAdamsons troweling and eddying of paint coalesce, in a paintings like Shepheards Cove, for example into inescapable suggestions of landscape. In the end, however, you can have your landscape associations and deny them too. For the painting almost invariably break up into thousands of heady passages of pure paint-handling, where, if you take them moment by moment, you free yourself, dab by dab, swipe by swipe, into engagement with a febrile, unapologetic aggregation of painting acts. The result is deep healing calm. As William Blake once remarked about mastery, whereas Damn braces, so Bless relaxes.
Getting Closer is Good
GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 27, 2004
Michael Adamson, Moore Gallery
$1,050 -- $11,000. Closes today, 80 Spadina Ave., Suite 404, Toronto; 416-504-3914.
Although it is precisely opposed to the art-viewing convention whereby gallerygoers stand way, way off from a work of art and squint at it from a distance, the best way to look at a piece of art, I think, is from up close.
It makes sense to me to stand more or less where the artist was standing when he or she made the thing in the first place. This is especially true of the opulent new paintings of Michael Adamson's exhibition Sunrise Life, now at Toronto's Moore Gallery. With them, the closer you get, the more transforming you'll find the experience.
There are at least a couple of erroneous impressions floating around out there about Michael Adamson's paintings. One is that they don't change very much from exhibition to exhibition. The second is that I write about his work too often. Both ideas are, of course, untrue. I write often about Adamson's work, in fact, because it has been so absorbing to watch him change so profoundly over the past half-dozen years.
He began -- in gallery spaces he'd rent for a month just to show his own work -- with clean, lucid paintings composed of horizontal stripes or planes of colour, held in place by thick, chewy buttons or nipples of paint.
Then, this clarifying structure suddenly dissolved into large, all-over, Bonnard-like miasmas of paint, lavishly and even profligately applied. Now, for this current exhibition, the formerly melting grids, overslathered with rich oil pigment (applied with a chromatic generosity you don't find in our arid and under-sensuous times) are made to support an entirely new level of pictorial discourse in Adamson's art.
For one thing, there is a tumultuous proliferation, in these new paintings, of the artist's acquisition of landscape-painting ideas in general, and of highly specific images punctuating those landscape ideas in particular -- many of them derived from the artist's frequent trips to Jamaica, where he now owns property. Look closely and you'll see there are Caribbean-style houses in Birch Street, for example; an African-style cottage and passing surveillance helicopter in The Cabin; and a tiny black revolver in Night. And a dog chasing a rabbit. And reflecting pools and blossoming trees. This is the kind of thing you have to move up close to see (since the imagery is both swept up and deposited by waves of glorious painting).
What is also new in Adamson's most recent work is his increasingly gleeful acknowledgment of the influence of other, earlier painters: Brueghel, in his sweeping vistas; Altdorfer in his sky-high overviews; and, in one of his most beautiful paintings, Towns Town, a sudden methodological recourse to the late and vastly neglected Toronto artist Harold Town's way of scraping wide swaths of pigment into memorable base-configurations upon which you can proceed to build a painting.
New Heights
GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 14, 2009
Michael Adamson at the Moore Gallery Ltd. and Jordan Broadworth at the Leo Kamen Gallery
Adamson's paintings sell for $800-$16,800. Until Nov. 28, 80 Spadina Ave., Suite 404, Toronto; 416-504-3914. Broadworth's paintings sell for $2,000-$10,500. Closes today, 80 Spadina Ave., Suite 406, Toronto; 416-504-9515
Adamson and Broadworth were going for a beer together at the end of the afternoon I saw their shows, and it made me think about how the young painters are sort of neck and neck in their careers. Both are enormously gifted painters. Adamson is more lush, more relaxed and less strident in his approach to painting, invariably erecting checkerboard-like squares and rectangles up the face of his pictures, which he then punctuates by nailing them into place with thick push buttons of pigment.
Broadworth is more ruminative, less open. Where Adamson is guileful in his apparent guilelessness (people love what he does, and buy it by the truckload), Broadworth buries himself in his dark, writhing canvases, scraping away and distressing almost all traces of painterly incident on his generative grounds, wrestling with the production of his final images (while Adamson is all figure, imposed on waiting ground). Compared to Broadworth, Adamson looks sunny and relaxed.
What it comes to, I guess, is that you look to Broadworth for painterly Sturm und Drang, whereas you might better look to Adamson for a painterly holiday in the sun, for a "beaker full of the warm South," as Keats once said about a glass of wine. They're both good painters, and they're both the real deal. The difference between them is the felt stress you feel or do not feel in their work.
WITH ACESSIBILTY IN MIND
WHERE MAGAZINE
CRAIG MOY 2011
As viewers of art, we've been conditioned to expect a certain amount of impenetrability in pieces designated as "abstract." We expect the creators of such works to be similarly opaque- to describe their practice in only the most highfalutin terms, to shrug off any attempt at describing intention or meaning. Applied to Michael Adamson, the stereotype could not be more inaccurate. Instead, the Toronto-based artist has an almost disarmingly forthright attitude about the colourful canvasses he has been producing for the past two decades.
"Abstract painting," he says, "is actually the most straightforward type of painting. There's no illusion, there's no picture of a thing. It's the most rudimentary way to make art. And yet it's a form that makes a large amount of people nervous."
The irony , of course, is that abstraction was born in reaction to the formalism and intellectual rigidity that, by the late 19th century, had made visual art something of a specialist pursuit. With this understanding, Adamson aims to create pieces with universal appeal. His paintings are equally at home on a gallery wall or above one's mantlepiece: they are ample- Adamson consistently employs a full chromatic colour palette- without being overbearing; even at a glance they reveal intriguing contrasts, gestures, patterns and textures.And when it comes to interpretation, the artist insist we are already equipped to draw deeper meanings. The landscape paintings of the Group of Seven are a prime influence, as are the works of renowned Québécois collective Les Automatises and pioneering abstract expressionist Hans Hoffmann. A background in film photography also informs his interest in the "magic of the material" and how a medium bears upon an artists intentions. With this knowledge, Adamson's paintings open themselves to endless analysis from the perspectives of art history, social history, regional identity, and much more.
It is precisely this hybridisation, this commingling of associations, which makes Adamson's paintings so accessible. He brings to his work a deep awareness of culture, politics and history, and weaves these discrete threads into a unique and vibrant tapestry. Viewers can look at an Adamson piece from virtually any angle, and come to their own understanding, and, finally, move the artistic discussion forward.
Michael Adamson is the king of pop-ups
GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED MARCH 12, 2013
Toronto artist Michael Adamson has spearheaded guerrilla shows and inspired a new generation of painters to be more pai
A classically trained painter who is his own guerrilla-style gallerist. A romantic who is a realist. A third-generation artist who strives to do things first. Michael Adamson is a contradiction in terms.
"There are two camps of people," the 41-year-old abstract painter reflects from his Toronto studio, "those who see me as political or apolitical. But really, I'm both, a synthesis of divergent movements. I paint because I love beauty. And I love beauty because it disrupts despots. I don't do what the leaders do."
Adamson is his own leader, responsible for inspiring a new generation of art school students to pick up their paint brushes to create lush, colour saturated works whose raison-d'être is that they are, well, painterly.
"I'm the first in Toronto and maybe all of Canada in recent times to challenge the institutional ideology of art as needing to be conceptual or photo-based or Marxist-feminist," says the Toronto-born graduate of the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, who also trained at Ryerson University and the esteemed Gesamkunst Hochschule in Germany.
"I did this by getting young people painting again, at a period in history when it hasn't been strictly fashionable to do so."
Adamson's anti-establishment stance compelled him early in his career to move from gallery to gallery when his work, alternating between conceptualism and expressionism, proved difficult to pigeonhole. Growing tired of the art world politics, at the end of the 1990s he began creating showrooms for his own work in vacant properties around Toronto, drawing both crowds and rave reviews.
"People call them pop-ups now, but no one was doing this sort of thing then," he continues. "These were artist run centres, sometimes derided as vanity projects, which presented guerrilla shows of new and unsung artists."
The idea eventually grew in popularity and soon even the establishment was taking notice.
"Major galleries started looking at the young painters again, artists who weren't afraid to pile on the paint until it was six inches thick," Adamson says. "And I taught them that. The young painters had followed my direction."
Abstraction in the Extended Field
PUBLISHED BY KAWARTHA NOW MARCH 2019
Solo exhibition by Michael Adamson at the Art Gallery of Northumberland
‘Effects of Sunlight on Water’ (oil on canvas, 12″x16”) by Michael Adamson. (Photo courtesy of the artist)
The Art Gallery of Northumberland is presenting a solo exhibition by Toronto artist Michael Adamson from Saturday, March 7th to Saturday, May 2nd.
Adamson studied at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ryerson University in Toronto, the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, and at the University of Kassel in Germany. His academic career has spanned various media including photography, video, and painting, giving him a platform to develop his own rich visual language enhanced by his understanding of art history and its relationship with contemporary painting.
“I am interested in teasing out the connections between seemingly disparate artists, such as the cave painters of Lasceaux and contemporary muralists like Katerina Grosse, or impressionist Claude Monet and serial abstractionist Pia Fries, in an attempt, not to level out painting, but to encourage cross fertilizations which, hopefully, will reinvigorate community and the appetites for the kind of nourishment found in good painting,” Adamson says.
Adamson creates a balance between conceptualism and expressionism, abstraction, and landscape, making each painting difficult to categorize. His work has been widely exhibited including in Toronto, London, Tokyo, and New York, and he is one of the most in-demand artists for private commissions, with works in collections in Switzerland, Hong Kong, France, Germany, Japan, Norway, the U.S., and the U.K.
An opening reception takes place on Saturday, March 7th.
The Art Gallery of Northumberland is located at on the third floor of the west wing of Victoria Hall (55 King St. W., Cobourg). Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday to Friday and noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. The gallery is closed on Mondays. For more information, visit www.artgalleryofnorthumberland.com.
St. Catharines winery to host art exhibition
TORONTO STAR
Sat., Feb. 26, 2022
Co-owner showcasing his collection of Michael Adamson’s work
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then 13 Street Winery has a lot to say.
The winery’s gallery, located at 1776 Fourth Ave. in St. Catharines, will be showcasing the art of Michael Adamson, with pieces from co-owner John Mann’s own collection.
The collection has been stored away for many years, and this will be the first time these early works by Adamson will be exhibited.
Born in 1971 in Toronto, Adamson has had work featured in dozens of solo and group exhibitions in Europe, Japan, the United States and across Canada.
His paintings can be found in many public, private and corporate collections including the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Bank of Montreal, Royal Bank of Canada, Holt Renfrew and the Metro Toronto Convention Center.
His paintings are known for blending landscape with abstraction.
The exhibition starts on Saturday, March 5, and runs until March 26.
A release from the winery said art has always been an integral part of its vision, as Mann has been collecting art for over 50 years.
Michael Adamson alla Thompson’s Gallery di Londra
ARCHTECTURAL DIGEST (ITALY)
28 GUIGNO 2021
di Sonia S. Braga
Torna a Londra, con una personale alla Thompson’s Gallery, il pittore canadese Michael Adamson. I suoi dipinti, vivaci e brillanti, si ispirano all’espressionismo astratto di Hans Hofmann e alla pittura modernista di Gerhard Richter.
Torna a Londra, con un’attesissima mostra alla Thompson’s Gallery, il pittore astratto Michael Adamson (1971), fra i più rappresentativi della scena artistica canadese. Formatosi alla Emily Carr University of Art and Design di Vancouver e alla Kunsthochschule Kassel, Adamson inizia nel 1998 a produrre i suoi inconfondibili dipinti a griglia, sottili scacchiere geometriche che rispecchiano la trama e la tessitura della tela. Combinando la sua formazione tecnica e pittorica con i primi esperimenti nel campo video-fotografico, Adamson si è distinto grazie a uno stile compositivo unico e innegabilmente seducente. Influenzato dai pittori modernisti come Hans Hofmann e Gerhard Richter, Adamson considera il paesaggio come una successione di linee delimitate da un’indefinita quanto sfumata linea dell’orizzonte.
I suoi dipinti appaiono come una sorta di personale stenografia della natura, una texture vivace e sauvage di idee, riflessioni ed emozioni. “Northern Vistas” , in programma alla Thompson Gallery fino al 10 luglio 2021, si ispira alle opere dell’espressionismo astratto di Hans Hofmann e rende manifestamente omaggio a Tom Thomson del Gruppo dei Sette, artista famoso per la sua rappresentazione della natura canadese. Gli oli luminosi disposti in schemi geometrici raffigurano il paesaggio nordamericano parcellizzato in griglie, come grandi quadranti che attraversano la metà superiore di un continente. La popolarità di Michael Adamson è globale: le sue opere sono presenti in gallerie e collezioni in tutta Europa, fino a Hong Kong. Nel 2016 la Thompson Gallery gli aveva già reso omaggio con una interessante personale. Fra le altre mostre ricordiamo quelle alla Couture Galleri di Stoccolma (2016), e nel 2020, Abstraction in the Extended Field alla Art Gallery of Northumberland di Cobourg, Ontario.