Siegfried Contemporary has the pleasure to showcase new works by US ceramicist Dean Adams.

Dean Adams is of American Nationality, based in Montana. He is also a Professor and teaches art at the Montana State University. Adams uses Ceramic sculpture as a confrontational tool, where he comments on social issues.

With his very witty and provocative sculptures Dean explores new Paradigms on how to look at male sexuality. He uses the means of ceramic to express these notions. He has chosen the image of the penis combined with other imagery, especially birds, to create icons of a new model contrary to popular cultural attitudes of male sexuality.

By detaching the penis from realistic human form and re-contextualizing with the bird form he creates a new paradigm for a contemporary world. He de-erotizes the penis and celebrates maleness in a playful, humorous way that permits viewers to let their guard down. Humor allows him to be more furtive. There is a parallel between his work and other form of humor. Bigoted humor is the most subversive form of intolerance because of the guise of humor. In his work he uses wit subversively, but in a positive way, allowing the viewer to consider the penis, maleness, homosexuality, heterosexuality, bisexuality in that way that is unhindered by the human form.

He intends his pieces to act as metaphors, representing uninhibited phallic sexuality which is negative to neither males nor females.

The exhibition’s title plays homage to Frank Wedekind’s play, Spring Awakening which with brutal honesty and a humoristic sense follows a group of adolescence while they explore their new found sexuality. The play, acts as a provocative critique to the sexually oppressive culture of the 19th century society. Following this path, Dean Adams with his humorous approach provides his own critique to today’s society. It is through his work that he is trying to violate a taboo born out of mainstream cultural connotations expressing male sexuality as characterized by abuse, domination, pornography and narcissism. In his eyes we are a society that is, paradoxically, phallocentric, phallophobic, homophobic and repressed.

Adams has shown his work extensively in America as well as China and is represented in some major Private as well as Museum collections around the world. This is Adams first exhibition in Europe.