Adam Mc Gown’s practice inhabits a space between painting and sculpture, where the physical substance of art making becomes both subject and structure. Working primarily with plywood and oil or water-based paints, Mc Gowan constructs three-dimensional forms that challenge the pictorial expectations of painting. His objects do not depict; they exist. Through a reduction of means, he highlights the tactile, material, and sensory conditions of the painted surface.
Mc Gowan’s approach is both reductive and materially expressive. By paring down his visual vocabulary, he allows the inherent properties of his chosen materials to articulate their own presence. The plywood grain, the resistance of the surface, the saturation of paint, all become integral to the works identity.
These constructions occupy a liminal position: they project from the wall, extending into the viewer’s space, yet remain tethered to the conventions of the painted plane. This oscillation between object and image is central to Mc Gowan’s inquiry into what painting can be when freed from representation.
The works’ stratified compositions demand a bodily encounter. Their projection from the wall draws the viewer into a spatial dialogue. An exchange that heightens awareness of both the object’s physical form and the viewer’s own movement in relation to it. McGowan’s works can be seen as abstract structures — simple, self-contained, and open to interpretation. They hint at functional or architectural design but have no utilitarian purpose, existing instead as independent objects that belong to no specific time or place.
Despite their structural clarity, Mc Gowan’s works remian unmistakably painterly. Sparse, fluid brush marks, traverse the surface, introducting a sense of rhythm and movement that offsets the rigidity of the geometric form. This deliberate lightness of touch invite a paradoxical reading: the works are at once solid and lyrical, static and fluid. The viewer senses the tension between precision and spontaneity, between the labour of construction and the immediacy of gesture.
In their formal restraint and material sensitivity, Mc Gowan’s works echo the investigation of constructivist and post-minimal artists such as El Lissitzky and Ron Gorchov, while situating themselves firmly within a contemporary discorse on materality and process. His surfaces oscillate between opacity and luminosity, between texture and smoothness, generating a visual and tactile interplay that speaks to the core concerns of abstraction.
At its essence , Mc Gowan’s practice is an exploration of painting ontology. An investigation into its most elemental conditions: form, composition, colour and the physical act of making. His works remind us that painting needs not to be confined to mimesis or representation, it can exist as a thing in itself, resolved in its own material presence. Through this , Mc Gowan invites viewers to engage not only with what is seen, but with what is felt. An encounter with painting as both object and experience.