Runner, by Philadelphia-based artist Adam Novak, places the figure and a lustful painting bravado on center stage. His protagonists have always maintained a certain solidity and cubist notion of space, but in Runner, the artist demonstrates an allover expansiveness of brushwork that calls to mind modernists such as Willem Dekooning and Franz Kline. The artist explains, "The gestural marks simultaneously construct and obliterate form and signifier, hybridizing them into a new visual language.”
Adam Novak is an artist currently living in Philadelphia who has lived and worked in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Exhibitions include “Vision Valley” at the Brand Art Center in Glendale, CA; “Alter Ego” at SCAD in Savannah, GA; and “Vanishing Points” at James Cohan Gallery in New York, NY. His work has been written about in Hyperallergic and The Brooklyn Rail. Novak has an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and was awarded a Pollock Krasner grant in 2018.