Julie Zener Gallery

Adam Shaw, born in New York City, creates textured and luminous oil paintings that are infused with the beauty and intrigue of the natural world. While informed by a lifelong study of art history, his true and enduring teachers are nature itself and the vital materiality of paint. Often blurring the boundaries between abstraction and representation, Shaw’s atmospheric paintings are at once familiar and mysterious.

His love of language, poetry, philosophy, mysticism, transformational alchemy and physics has found its way into many of his paintings, often juxtaposing, for example, Buddhist scripture, philosophical fragments, song lyrics and physics equations in the same work.

Shaw’s process involves the application and removal of multiple layers of paint, and a single work may take many years to complete. The lush textural surfaces retain a remarkable luminosity and visual record of his day-to-day painting practice which offers a glimpse into a life of spiritual exploration.

Shaw has been widely exhibited in the United States in galleries, museums and many public spaces.  His work is in hundreds of private and corporate collections throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe and Australia.