SELECTED WORKS BY Adam Cvijanovic
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Adam Cvijanovic
Love Poem (10 minutes after the end of gravity)
2005
flashe and house paint on tyvek
14ft x 75ft |
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Drawing inspiration from Renaissance fresco painting, Adam Cvijanovic’s ‘portable murals’ depict contemporary landscapes with a sense of celestial awe. Spanning 75 feet, Cvijanovic’s Love Poem captures the dreamy and disquieting essence of suburban Americana as a rapturous science fiction tableau. Envisioning sun-bleached L.A. ten minutes after the end of gravity, Cvijanovic’s utopia ascends in a whirlwind of consumerist ecstasy. Emulating movie backdrops as well as the acclivous perspective of cathedral dome tromp l’oiels, Love Poem… combines the sublime horror of disaster films with a majestic religiosity, as bungalows, Broncos, and palm trees are destroyed in the exaltation of their own perfectness. Painted entirely by the artist without assistants, on a plastic used by Fed Ex, Cvijavovic’s work reconstitutes the intimacy of timeless artistry with a modern day immediacy. |
Adam Cvijanovic
Love Poem (10 minutes after the end of gravity) - Detail
2005
flashe and house paint on tyvek
14ft x 75ft |
 |
Adam Cvijanovic
Love Poem (10 minutes after the end of gravity) - Detail
2005
flashe and house paint on tyvek
14ft x 75ft |
 |
Adam Cvijanovic
Love Poem (10 minutes after the end of gravity) - Detail
2005
flashe and house paint on tyvek
14ft x 75ft |
 |
Adam Cvijanovic
Love Poem (10 minutes after the end of gravity) - Detail
2005
flashe and house paint on tyvek
14ft x 75ft |
 |
Adam Cvijanovic
Showboat
2006
Oil on Panel
61 x 243.8 cm |
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Adam Cvijanovic doesn’t work from photographs, his invented compositions arise from the familiarity of internalised images. Using the same subject matter as Sassy Sally, Show Boat renders a smaller version of fairground aftermath. Painted in oil on board, Cvijanovic offers surrealism with a fixed visual logic. Set in a nowhere landscape, his festival remnants are made monolithic, each creating a sense of heightened spatialawareness via multiple vanishing points and extreme perspective. Rendered with the faded tones of American nostalgia, Cvijanovic envisions a ghost town of bygone delights and tawdry amusement. |
Adam Cvijanovic
Showboat - Detail
2006
Oil on Panel
61 x 243.8 cm |
 

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Adam Cvijanovic doesn’t work from photographs, his invented compositions arise from the familiarity of internalised images. Using the same subject matter as Sassy Sally, Show Boat renders a smaller version of fairground aftermath. Painted in oil on board, Cvijanovic offers surrealism with a fixed visual logic. Set in a nowhere landscape, his festival remnants are made monolithic, each creating a sense of heightened spatialawareness via multiple vanishing points and extreme perspective. Rendered with the faded tones of American nostalgia, Cvijanovic envisions a ghost town of bygone delights and tawdry amusement. |
Adam Cvijanovic
Sassy Sally
2003
Flashe and latex on tyvek
259 x 495cm |
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Stemming from his former job as a commercial muralist, Adam Cvijanovic’s paintings combine pop kitsch with the gravitas of historical painting. Completely self-taught, Cvijanovic approaches painting with an unconventional process: using a variety of acrylic and latex household paints on Tyvek, his vast images become transportable frescoes, giant architectural interventions that can be remodelled to fit various gallery spaces. Subverting the utopian connotations of monumental painting, Cvijanivic’s tableaux embrace the serene and idyllic while portraying haunting scenes of desolation. |
Adam Cvijanovic
Sassy Sally (Detail)
2003
Flashe and latex on tyvek
259 x 495cm |
 

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ARTIST INFORMATION
OTHER RESOURCES
artfacts.net
Additional information on Adam Cvijanovic
the-artists.orgModern and contemporary artists and art; Adam Cvijanovic
artnet.com - Philadelphia Story by Roberta Fallon
Adam Cvijanovic, who has been exhibiting since the mid-1980s and is now represented by Bellwether Gallery in Brooklyn, is gaining increasing praise for large-scale, deftly done illustrational landscapes and other scenes, ranging from cowboys in the West to a beach thronged with young people (he was also featured in the traveling "On the Wall" exhibition organized last year by RISD Museum's Judith Tannenbaum).
hammer.ucla.edu - Adam Cvijanovic by Steven Vincent
Although many words can describe glaciers—magnificent, desolate, pristine—ambiguous is not one of them. Trillions of tons of frozen water massed in continent-size sheets grinding over 10 percent of the earth’s surface tend to resist interpretation and relativistic philosophizing. Like all forces of nature, they demand acceptance on their own terms. Glaciers, in short, are just that—glaciers.
bellwethergallery.com
Collection of press on Adam Cvijanovic
bellwethergallery.com
Love Poem is Cvijanovic’s third solo show at Bellwether and features a 75 foot long painting of Los Angeles ten minutes after gravity has failed. Houses, bungalows, lawn chairs, palm trees, surfboards, street signs, SUVs and household debris rise and swirl 14 feet above and nearly 360 degrees around the viewer. Cvijanovic has completely imagined a supernatural, impossible and metaphorical event and rendered its full effect on the Southern Californian suburban landscape.
bellwethergallery.com
Virtual exhibitions of Adam Cvijanovic including:
Hello Chelsea
The Armory Show 2005
Love Poem, Ten Minutes After the End of Gravity
Adam Cvijanovic
villagevoice.com - Off the Wall: An Extreme Painter Lays It Out by Kim Levin
Adam Cvijanovic, who has been rolling with the punches ever since the latest crop of MFAs were toddlers. "He is so cool. He's the John Travolta of the art world. His reinvention of himself is awesome," says Becky Smith, proprietor of Bellwether, whose walls will host two of his hand-painted wallpaper murals in May.
voltashow.com
Adam Cvijanovic’s specialty is room-size wall murals. Cvijanovic paints his large scale murals with acrylic and house paint on Tyvek (the Dupont unrippable fiber used for FedEx envelopes). His works are hung using a clay-based adhesive, which makes them endlessly re-installable.
jameswagner.com - Adam Cvijanovic at Bellwether
citypaper.net - Putting It in Perspective by Robin Rice
Adam Cvijanovic's mural depicts the MOVE tragedy from a whole new vantage point by Robin Rice.
Cvijanovic has attempted to expand the meaning of this work by relating it to one of Edward Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom paintings, displayed on an easily overlooked wall outside the gallery, and to images of Osage on fire.
thebrooklynrail.org - Adam Cvijanovic’s third solo show at Bellwether Gallery
For Adam Cvijanovic’s third solo show at Bellwether Gallery, Love Poem (10 Minutes After the End of Gravity), he has created two monumental paintings that hark back to the triumphant decoration of late eighteenth-century Rococo. Painted on Tyvek, the indestructible, fibrous, synthetic used for FedEx envelopes and house construction, the works are affixed directly onto the wall; it is a process the artist terms “mobile frescoes.”
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Other artists in THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES: NEW CHINESE ART
Zhang Dali | Zeng Fanzhi | Wang Guangyi | Zheng Guogu | Zhang Haiying | Zhang Hongtu | Zhang Huan | Qiu Jie | Xiang Jing | Shi Jinsong | Fang Lijun | Yue Minjun | Li Qing | Wu Shanzhuan | Shen Shaomin | Li Songsong | Zhan Wang | Liu Wei | Zhang Xiaogang | Zhang Xiaotao | Cang Xin | Shi Xinning | Li Yan | Bai Yiluo | Zhang Yuan | Yin Zhaohui | Feng Zhengjie
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