Adam McEWEN

The neo-Conceptualist Adam McEwen, born in London in 1965, graduated from Oxford with a degree in English Literature before changing track and enrolling at the California Institute of the Arts. He has been based in New York City since 2000, working regularly with the Nicole Klagsbrun gallery in Chelsea.

Shoegazer, McEwen’s first major solo show at Klagsbrun in 2004, featured a narrow, ankle-high strip of mirror beneath a close-up of Michael Jackson’s feet clad in special dancing shoes; nearby, a purple-tinted image showed an inverted version of the fa-mous photograph of Mussolini and mistress strung up in Milan. McEwen also covered the gallery’s outside windows with white fabric, creating a ghostly light, and evoking a disabled movie screen or a giant sail. Pursuing his mordant exploration of history, fame and death, another of McEwen’s landmark works involved blown-up reproductions of newspaper obituaries of celebrities, mostly written by McEwen himself – a hark-back to his days as an obituary writer for a British newspaper. His subjects, though – among them Nicole Kidman, Rod Stewart, Jeff Koons and Bill Clinton – were (and are) still alive.