Wednesday 8th May to Sunday 19th May.
The Robert Phillips Gallery, Riverhouse Barn, Walton on Thames.
Supported by the RC Sherriff Trust.
Private View Saturday 11th May, 5pm – 7pm. Contact info@richardfadams.com for invitation.
Richard’s Haunted Selfie work explores four things.
Channelling and managing extreme personal trauma through art, reducing its impact on the person and helping one to manage it. This is extremely autobiographical work about my year of hell in 2018 where I almost died, had four spells in hospital with operations and contracted a potentially killer bug.
It tackles the dark underbelly of selfie culture. Each piece is a selfie that aims to show the bad bits we all curate out of our selfies, it takes a direct dig at the people who always show themselves being “great.” Selfies are the biggest cultural art form of the last decade and they have resulted in a quite remarkable culture emerging where people curate their lives for personal gain. We all get sick of them but at the same time we are fascinated, from the Kardashians at the top who have talents for precisely nothing in other fields to people who actively exploit their abusive relationships to gain status and viewers, it’s a culture the like of which we have never seen before.
Visually and aesthetically my work sits firmly in the Northern European tradition of expressionism, sitting firmly in the line from Rembrandt through Courbet, Munch, Kokoshka to Bacon and beyond.
It is largely a mix of digital paintings done with a stylus, some computational pixel manipulation and is created to be simulacra of the works of the expressionists through exploring contemporary computational media, much like the pop artists used the emergent media they had.
Richard trained in art at four different art schools. In the early 90’s he became fascinated by computers and became a pioneering computer artist and award-winning teacher of art and music.
Since then he has been a pioneer in interactive TV, made games, worked as a programmer, creative director, head of digital and highly successful independent enterprise consultant at many companies including Microsoft XBox, BBC, BSkyB, Aviva and The Royal Shakespeare Company. He was principal at the School of Communication Arts. He has taught creativity, art and technology at UWL(TVU), Birkbeck College, London College of Fashion, School of Communication Arts, and he held a visiting Professorship at Salford University. He is currently Visiting Senior Fellow at the University of Lincoln.
He is a re emerging third age computer artist.
He has exhibited in Surrey, Suffolk, West Midlands and Yorkshire.
