Emotional paintings by Adam Lupton show how we get inside our own heads

On show at New York's GR Gallery this month, the 18 oil and acrylic paintings weave together "individual and societal rituals, spiritual schizophrenia, and self-defining myth", perhaps illuminating our ongoing desire for certainty – particularly during the events of this year.

Borrowing from Greek myths, religious rituals, rock lyrics, modern dating plights, domestic routines, history, introspection, sexuality, and compulsions – the artworks reveal our own isolation and anxieties in an increasingly uncertain world.

Entitled Cerberus, Lupton's paintings appear almost like a momentary hallucination, a deep lapse into one's own head. The familiarity of the world is punctured by distorting perspectives, abstracted figures, and a familiar-but-unknown element that feels both real and uncertain – an emotional déjà vu of sorts.

"In some instances, this feels overly full, and in others painfully vacant – like the symphony that compulsive ruminations often play on the senses," explains the Gallery. "The abstracting, cacophonic iterations of an individual embody the intertwining dialogues one has with the multitudes of one’s self. This cyclical monologue-cum-dialogue both agitates and submerges tension while dampening time and space of the outside world."

Adam Lupton's Cerberus will be his first solo show at GR Gallery and launches on 14 October, running until 14th November 2020. Discover more at www.alupton.com.