Baert Gallery is pleased to announce 20 Atmospheres, Adam Tylicki’s (b.1986, New York, NY) second solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibition will run between February 4th and March 18th. The opening reception will take place on Saturday, February 4th, between 6 pm and 8 pm.
It took Adam Tylicki a total of 4 years, 3 months, and 11 days to complete the work that led to the creation 20 Atmospheres, the multi-disciplinary installation piece that may be described as simultaneously a sculpture show, a work of land art, and a performance piece whose progression is borne within the very formal plastic parameters of the resultant work proper.
The course of actions that culminated in 20 Atmospheres commenced with the manufacture of seven polished stainless steel sculptural pieces whose faultlessly even surfaces, metallic sheen, and cleanly symmetrical geometrical shapes are distinctly reminiscent of Minimalism’s erstwhile “specific objects”. Tylicki began the process by building a custom English Wheel metalworking tool to allow for the creation of precise curvature conceived for the sculptures. The artist then proceeded to fabricate his own stainless-steel panels that were consequently precision-welded using tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding equipment to ensure the complete air-tightness and impermeability of the final pieces. Tylicki later minutely grounded away the consequent welds, rewelded the shapes, then re-grounded them again, over and over, until perfectly sharp and smooth edges without the slightest possibility of porosity were achieved. The sculptures were finished with several stages of polishing, providing for an unblemished mirror-like reflective surface veneer.
Once the pieces were manufactured, Tylicki encased them in the specially designed and constructed (as with everything else, by the artist’s own efforts) metal cages and took them offshore near the coast of Faro, Portugal. There, equipping the cages with waterproof and highly shock-resistant camera rigs has allowed Tylicki to capture the phantasmagorical-seeming action of the underwater gravitational force—that’s the titular 20 Atmospheres, denoting the number of units of sea level pressure (approximately 292 pounds per square inch of surface) at the depth of roughly 660 feet—as well as the violence of its blunt potency’s indifferent bashing of the steel sculptures’ perfectly polished surfaces. In the resultant footage, the underwater gravitational force makes an abrupt, as if cannily timed for a jump scare, appearance, with a jagged cadence of a Monster horror movie sequence.
At the gallery, this unnerving underwater footage will be presented alongside the sculptural works bearing the traces of the depicted violence they sustained.
Adam Tylicki holds a BA of Fine Art Photography from the Academy of Fine Arts of Gdansk and a Master’s Degree of Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in London. The artist works in a wide range of media, including performance, installation, sound, video, and painting.
Tylicki spent seven years of his life living on a boat, and the intimate proximity to the aquatic forces afforded by that experience profoundly influenced the direction of his practice, grounded in the direct knowledge of, and a dialectical response to, the vagaries of environmental co-existence.
20 Atmospheres is the first in the continuing series of artistic experimentations that inquire into the metaphysics of climate and oceanic life.
