Chapter NY is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition featuring Clémentine Bruno and Adam Gordon. The exhibition, comprising haunting subjects and ghostly vestiges, offers a diffuse meditation on existence. Bruno’s meticulously layered abstract paintings and Gordon’s uncanny photographs are paradoxically concrete and elusive. Through repetitive processes, each artist finds subtle nuance in repeated forms, reinscribing their own artistic gesture.

Clémentine Bruno’s unceremoniously arranged paintings articulate a constellation of abstract thought. Her formal elements, rendered in oil paint, appropriate and dislocate elements of art history, literature, and film. The artist begins each painting by laboriously applying numerous layers of traditional gesso to a wooden surface. Bearing the traces of the artist’s labor, her paintings objectify and signify the creative act. Once offered in the exhibition, they become autonomous objects within the greater capitalist system. In Storage for apparition—a sculpture which doubles as a lamp and illuminates nothing in particular—Bruno replicates and demystifies the conceptual function of her paintings by revealing its readymade components and acknowledging the processes of labor that enabled its creation.

Adam Gordon presents a series of photographs for the first time. This new body of work builds upon his multi-disciplinary practice which shifts between installation, painting, and constructed encounters often conceived and shaped from a photographic perspective. Gordon’s photographed subjects evoke a candid transience at odds with their carefully contrived environments. His precise spatial constructions and unconventional compositions unsettle our inherent desire for a defined narrative. Gordon captures unexpected nuance in his banal subjects, training our attention towards the subtle ambiguities of everyday existence.

Clémentine Bruno (b. 1994, Paris) lives and works in London and received her MA in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2019. She has had a solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, London (2020) and three-person exhibitions at Space 52, Athens (2019) and Studio 59, London (2018). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Stoppenbach & Delestre, London (2020), Project Native Informant, London (2019), Sans Titre, Paris (2018), and Slade Research Centre, London (2018), among others. In May 2021, Bruno will participate in a group exhibition, BAMBI WOODS PRESENTS, at Ergo Collective Space and Space 52 in Athens.

Adam Gordon (b. 1986, Minneapolis, MN) lives and works in New York and received his MFA from Yale University in 2011. He has had solo exhibitions at Galleria ZERO, Milan; Chapter NY, New York; The Power Station, Dallas; Hunter/Whitfield, London; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Gordon’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Project Native Informant, London; New Gallerie, Paris; Andrew Kreps, New York; National Exemplar, New York; and Boates Fine Arts, São Paulo. Gordon has an upcoming solo exhibition at Project Native Informant in London.