About

Adam Forman:

Born 1954: attended life drawing at St Martins in London as a schoolboy. Considered Art school in 1971 but opted for University. Left fairly ignominiously in 1973, not before shooting Super 8mm footage on a camera borrowed from the Physics department of Cambridge University. This particular film has yet to be edited. A circuitous route to hospital work and medicine followed, beginning training as a doctor in 1979. The transformative powers of art were dormant until 1990, now a GP, and reconnected with life drawing. Began painting again but dealing only in abstraction until 1999. Finally entered art school in Sheffield in 1993 on a part time painting BA for five years.
Upending a Sheffield career as a GP moved to London in 1999 to start an MA in Fine Art at the University of East London. Increasingly interested in public spaces my final show included many performances spaces, the figure(in the form of the artist) appearing in several of these; the doctor appearing in many fewer. The artist also began appearing in his own films; dealing with naked anger and identity.
A part time Professional Doctorate followed; again for five years as the artist had become a fixture as a GP in Hackney. There ensued a series of work exploring the spaces patients and Drs inhabit; “Dr Dr”.
The preoccupation with public spaces then focused on travel spaces and included a Travel Scholarship to research the psychology of travel spaces in Moscow, Cairo and Kuala Lumpur. This culminated in a final Doctoral show of paintings, drawings and also nineteen films and a sequence of still photographs, Passage 2006.
Surveillance, incidental or intended,developed as a recurrent theme, including the surveillance surrounding the development of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. This resulted in the CCTV series in 2010; painted images from imaginary CCTV cameras.
Using newspaper photo images as a source I explored the world of Ascot racegoers and their rarefied world. The Ascot series resulted. The Precious project  preoccupied in 2015-16. Again the initial source material was from newspaper photos; those of Agbogbloshie by Kevin McElvaney published in the Guardian and those of Men’s fashion week published across various print and digital media.

Inconvenient Lunacy followed, dealing with inhabitants of asylums from the nineteenth century onwards detained for the convenience of others .
Then Crossing: Hackney 365 . Started in 2017 I planned to take the same photo every day for a year but being away at times it took nearly 15 months to achieve the 365 needed. These formed a slide show projection but also the source material for drawings, lithographs and paintings. each medium had a unique way of describing the passage of time and documenting the changes from day to day. This project was exhibited in 2019.

How do we remember? documented the contents of my Mother’s desk when she died in 1987. It explored how we interpret the past through our own memories and current concerns. There is no one version of an individual’s past, even if they leave so much personal material.

Since then I have faced the challenge of landscape, documented in urbanscapes, the project Estuarine and in particular the 2022 exhibition Edgelands.
Adam Forman