Adam Parker Smith

ADAM PARKER SMITH
Born 1978, California, USA. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Adam Parker Smith is an American artist whose sculptural practice explores the unstable boundary between the familiar and the surreal. Drawing simultaneously from classical sculpture, popular culture and the visual language of everyday objects, Smith creates works in which humour and absurdity coexist with a striking sense of permanence.

Initially trained as a painter, Smith gradually developed a sculptural vocabulary based on illusion and material transformation. Balloons, pool floats, sleeping bags and other seemingly fragile or disposable objects are meticulously recreated in resin, fibreglass, steel and bronze, producing an uncanny tension between appearance and reality. Objects associated with celebration, leisure or intimacy become monuments — solid, enduring and strangely archaeological.

In recent years, Smith has extended this investigation toward the history of classical sculpture itself. Working notably with Carrara marble, bronze, aluminium and stainless steel, he appropriates and transforms figures and compositions inherited from Greek and Roman antiquity. Mythological subjects such as Apollo, Venus, Medusa, Perseus or Asclepius are fragmented, compressed or reconfigured, confronting the authority of the classical canon with the visual codes of contemporary culture. His most recent works continue this dialogue between antiquity and the present, monumentality and absurdity, permanence and transience.

Smith studied painting at the University of California, Santa Cruz, before receiving his MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, the Times Museum in Guangzhou, the Watermill Center in New York and the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, where his solo exhibition For the Time Being was presented in 2024. Recent solo exhibitions include 1.2.3. and Carolyn at Hans Alf Gallery in Copenhagen.