“My goal is to highlight the performative nature of life, the darkly comic realities of queer existence, and even to draw awareness ideas of masquerade and (non)conformity as a reality of how we cope, distract, and react to the human condition and our own fragile sense of self.” -Adam Baker
Adam Baker is a London based abstract-figurative painter working in oil to explore queer themes and tragicomic realities of human existence. His work’s inherently subversive nature exists in striking contrast to the conventional medium and techniques typically associated with oil paint, emphasized by an interest in LGBTQIA issues affecting the community. However, Baker situates his perspective as autobiographical, imagined, and subjective, allowing the viewer to draw their own respective readings. His paintings tend to be narrative-based, amplified and exaggerated to create an unsettling, almost dream-like painterly mise-en-scè€ne. Baker often uses found imagery or vintage photographs of male sporting teams as a starting point, combined with other imagery to create a hallucinatory, slightly off-putting tableau that he then re-approaches and further exaggerates. Through this process, Baker subverts the original purpose of the image - the celebration of masculine physical achievement - and accentuates the homoerotic undertones, slightly mocking heteronormative masculinity and thereby ‘queering’ the perception of the image.