John Adelman

Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to announce A CONVERSATION BETWEEN ARTISTS: Michelle Mackey and John Adelman on Saturday, January 28th, at 4:30 p.m. Refreshments will be served as the artists discuss their work. On view in the gallery are exhibitions by both artists: Michelle Mackey: Beyond Measure and John Adelman: Yes, that might work…

Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of, Yes, that might work…, an exhibition of recent ink on canvas and paper works by John Adelman. An opening reception will be held Saturday, January 7 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. Yes, that might work…, marks the sixth solo exhibition with the gallery and it continues through March 19, 2023...

Today we’d like to introduce you to John Adelman. Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours? I grew up in a small town in northern Ohio, majored in drawing, painting, and printmaking at The Ohio State University. Worked in a t-shirt screen printing factory, where I produced approximately 12 million images in 11+ years. Moved to TX in 2003, and began my graduate studies at UNT in Denton, which was initiated by my sister, Amie, full professor, program coordinator of the Fibers Dept... 

John Adelman’s artistic skills are fully in evidence in eleven new drawings completed this year, each executed on canvas in gel ink and acrylic.  They illustrate a wide range of formal approaches through which Adelman follows a strict set of rules to achieve his pictorial goals. This might be regarded as conceptualist process, but the result of his meticulous technique feels more important than the actions used to complete the pieces. He repeatedly uses text and certain shapes like nails traced on the surface while taking a tally. Many of the pieces, like the ethereal “38724," have the number of nails rendered over the surface as their title...

Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of, Drawing: Attn, an exhibition of new ink drawings on canvas by John Adelman. An opening reception will be held Saturday evening, October 14th from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. This exhibition continues through Saturday, December 23.

Drawing: Attn is Adelman’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery and it continues to explore the material qualities of ink. Accumulative and compulsive, his compositions are strictly defined by a series of rules that the artist sets for himself. The works are diverse in scale, subject, and resources, and all created in a formula driven manner...

...While John Adelman has recently begun adding three-dimensional elements to his obsessive pen and ink drawings, this piece surprised me because it's entirely 3D, composed of a plaster cast bust, a metal coin slide (that perfectly suggests a flapping tongue!) and a marble base; yet it's still in keeping with what Adelman calls his "dismantling" concept... 

Holly Johnson Gallery has split the body and mind with her offering of John Adelman and Anna Bogatin...

John Adelman follows the rules. Rules prescribe the subject for each of his drawings. Precise and odd, they dominate every mark.

42 page fully illustrated catalogue published on the occasion of "John Adelman: One of Two" from November 23 - February 15, 2014. Catalogue includes an essay by Jonathan A. Molina-Garcia.

Available at the gallery and on Blurb.  

Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of, John Adelman: One of Two, an exhibition of new drawings that elicit astonishing imagery from painstaking work with logical systems.

For most of his career, John Adelman has explored the material qualities of ink on paper, creating works of art that take on an incredible physical and visceral presence after successive layers of ink have been industriously applied. His compositions are strictly defined by a series of rules that the artist sets for himself. As others have noted, they follow – if a little peripherally - in the footsteps of minimalist and conceptual rule-based art that saw the likes of Sol LeWitt or Josef Albers, and a post-structural interest in art as text, rife with connotative value...

Adelman follows the tradition of rule-based art, with systems derived from mathematics, logic, personal, and/or consequential rules. So disciplined is this work that it could be mistaken as computer generated but don’t be fooled, this is where John Adelman’s brilliance lies.

John Adelman’s work continues to follow traditions of rule-based art, with systems derived from mathematics, logic, personal, and/or consequential rules set by the artist.

Adelman is an artist who plays by the rules. In September of 2008, Hurricane Ike devastated Galveston and Houston and ruined the artist’s dictionary (The Unabridged Encyclopedic Webster’s Dictionary of 1989).

John Adelman is an artist who plays by the rules. Of course, they are rules he sets for himself with each new work, and so they do not seem too onerous. And although they consistently produce elegant and engaging drawings, some of them seem a little odd.

Following traditions of rule-based art, the drawings of John Adelman contain a preordained conceptual methodology. Rules consisting of a single resource, a constant, and a variable provide a focused exploration of a singular mindset directing the work to its conclusion.