New York · 06/11/2026
Adam Putnam: Deity
Deity is Adam Putnam's fifth solo exhibition with P·P·O·W, an arrangement of sculptures and other improbable objects. Through a continually accumulating body of imagery made with photography, drawing, sculpture, film, installation, and performance, Putnam explores the shifting boundaries between architecture and nature, collective and individual experience, and the mundane and the transcendent. For Putnam, meaningful connections lie in the spaces within and between things—in what he calls "the format of the fragment." Rather than being grouped into discrete bodies of work, these remnants build up from one presentation to the next without end. Part of a personal mythology that has unfolded over three decades, Deity can be seen as a sequel to Reclaimed Empire, an ongoing film project begun in 2008. Here, the video fragments of landscapes and broken architectural models are replaced by discarded tree branches—dead, orphaned, broken, and washed up on coastlines around the world—which Putnam carves into the shapes of human limbs. Swept together, a salvaged empire becomes a reclaimed body. Unlike his previous solo exhibition, centered on a monumental tower, Deity invites viewers to look down. Drawing on earlier architectural visualizations, a mysterious octagonal pool of water sits at the center of a hexagonal tile floor made from earth gathered around the artist's studio in Maine. Recalling the oracles of ancient Greece, the water's reflection casts enigmatic, vibrating images set in motion by the movement of people in the room, of the building, and of the city itself. Together with newly printed photographs and other small structures, the fragments gathered in Deity act as a map, a snippet of a dream, and a glimpse into another reality. Adam Putnam (b. 1973) has had solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York; Kunstverein München; Locust Projects, Miami; and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, among others. His work has appeared in group exhibitions including Drawing 2020 at Gladstone Gallery, New York; Rockaway! at MoMA PS1, New York; Paper at Artists Space, New York; the 2008 Whitney Biennial; the 2008 Busan Biennale; the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; and The Plain of Heaven, curated by Peter Eleey for Creative Time and the High Line, New York. In 2007 he co-curated Blow Both of Us with Shannon Ebner at Participant Inc., New York, and in 2009 he curated Everything Must Go, a solo exhibition of works by Martin Wong at P·P·O·W. His work is in the permanent collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, among others. In 2024 his work was included in P·P·O·W's group exhibition Airhead, and it has recently been featured in Voice of Space: UFOs and Paranormal Phenomena at The Drawing Center, New York, and Tarot!: Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
