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Harry Adams

Harry Adams is the collaborative pseudonym of British artists Steven Lowe and Adam Wood. While the duo has worked closely together since meeting at art school in 1988, they officially adopted the collective title of Harry Adams in 2008. Despite being trained as painters, their early collaborative projects were loud, musical ventures—most notably the band STOT21stCplanB, whose accompanying music videos and multimedia elements revealed a strong, unified visual sensibility.

Over their long, hardworking partnership, they have expanded into an array of diverse disciplines. These include painting, drawing, film, performance, printmaking, photography, digital montage, and artists' books. They have also run independent galleries, curated shows, and spearheaded political print publications, including the subversive Art Hate project in collaboration with painter Billy Childish.

In recent years, the focal point of their practice has been the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop, a dynamic gallery and studio premises founded by Steven Lowe. L-13 provides a creative vehicle for Harry Adams alongside a community of independent artists and musicians, including James Cauty, Jamie Reid, and Billy Childish. Operating less like a traditional commercial gallery and more like a collaborative band, the L-13 community challenges traditional notions of individual authorial identity.

This defiant stance was forged during Lowe and Wood's university days. As art students, they devised a joint performance piece for their final degree assessment. Denied permission to be graded as a partnership, they performed the exact same piece separately under their individual names, the examination board passing one artist and failing the other. This contradictory verdict made institutional ideas of success and failure seem entirely redundant. It instilled a lifelong indifference—and active defiance—toward institutional validation.

The current paintings of Harry Adams present visionary landscapes exploring the timeless tension between creation and destruction. Drawing thematic weight from the apocalypses, heavens, and utopias of global mythico-religious art, their canvases blend polarities like beauty and ugliness, order and disorder, into unresolved paradoxes that intentionally evade tidy meanings. Their work simultaneously disrupts and pays homage to traditional artistic absolutism and perfectionism, rendering saints grubby whilst grubby things are rendered beautiful.  Ultimately, this romantic project positions the painter as a figure with a unique closeness to ecstatic knowledge, proving that a creative spirit can thrive even amidst horror, filth, and stupidity.