Adam Amram
Love is Infectious
March 18 - April 24, 2022

Mother is pleased to present Love is Infectious, Adam Amram’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring recent paintings completed over the course of his winter residency at Mother | Beacon. The show runs from 18 March through 24 April 2022. Mother | Beacon is located on the ground floor at 1154 North Avenue, Beacon, NY.

Adam Amram’s melting, melodic paintings in his exhibition, Love is Infectious, depict everyday moments rendered beguiling in Orphic color. Employing a slightly askew perspective and contrasting color to give structure to his compositions, Amram depicts narratives that provoke a sensation of existential urgency, reflecting his sense for the perplexity and vulnerability of the human being.

“Love is Infectious,” the exhibition's titular painting, is a vast nocturne landscape set in a public park. The composition is punctuated by three pyramidical beams of artificial light. In the contrasting shadows, under the park’s canopy, a saxophonist is rendered with solemn closed eyes and bare feet. His instrument—inextricable from his being—blows musical notes into the night air. Nearby, a circular rink is populated by a spectacle of rollerbladers. They joyfully ride and contort, reflecting one another in the rapture of the musician's energetic gift. A blanket rests on the grass in the darkened foreground, atop the blanket an abandoned picnic basket beckons. The ambiguous contents of the basket simultaneously suggest the sweetness of a treat and the violence of an incision. Amram depicts an interior scene in muted warm and cool hues in “No Longer Put Together.” Wood grain paneling defines the background of the composition, while the meticulous rendering of a wicker chair’s woven seat serves as ground for a tossed hat. Near the hat’s shadow we notice a tiny rip in the woven seat—subtle disruption front and center.

In his work, Amram seeks to capture what beings must contend with—the pursuit of joy, communion, and wonder as essential to our being, pressing against the transient nature that pervades our existence. Amram has nurtured his gift for mining enchantment within the mundane and that is reflected in the tenderly labored surfaces of his work. His craft may be equated with a vehicle for embedding love into the world—marking moments of absolute awareness.

-Paola Oxoa, March 2022


Adam Amram (b. 1994 Haifa, Israel) is a painter, sculptor, and printmaker who lives in Palo Alto, California. Amram’s recent work renders vibrantly colorful portraits of humanity in various moments—both those quotidian and mesmeric—be it a sparse still-life or a life affirming encounter with a stranger. Many of his paintings contain a distorted perspective, creating a distilled, uncomfortable sense of closeness to the subject at hand. His recent sculptural works elongate or smoosh down the human face in putty-like colors. Across all mediums, Amram’s works invoke a deep sense of yearning by way of their unique color, space, and fantastical narratives, which contemplate the challenges of life and relish in the remarkability of existence.

Amram earned a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD) in 2016. He has shown most recently with Mother Gallery (Beacon, NY), The de Young Fine Arts Museum (San Francisco, CA), Works On Paper Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), Harpy (Rutherford, NJ/ Brooklyn, NY), Melanie Flood Projects + Adams and Ollman Gallery (Portland, OR), and Resort (Baltimore, MD). Amram attended the Yale School of Art Norfolk Summer Fellowship in 2015, and was an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT) in 2018. Amram was recently named the 2019-2020 YoungArts Daniel Arsham Fellow. His work has recently been published in Art Maze Magazine.