Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present Lollipop, Los Angeles-based painter Adam Higgins' second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition features paintings of translucent-handled screwdrivers on top of images. For these works, Higgins arranges screwdrivers on top of photographic prints, then photographs the pairings again to use as references for each painting.

The underlying snapshots consist of scenes the artist takes from his daily life. A viewer’s experience of these paintings changes depending on the distance from which they are seen. From afar, they are all about photography: pictures of objects and objects on pictures. At middle distance, the paint reveals the artist’s affection for gesture, color and formal structure. Drawn close, they explode into a welter of abstract fundament. The screwdriver, a hard yet changeable object, looks less like itself the longer one looks at it.

An object like that can be a companion across lifetimes, a prop in a theater, a stone in a poem, or candy in a picture, e.g: “As a boy, he found it perfectly normal to insert a lollipop into his mouth, but as he pulled out a screwdriver, he awoke as an old man in his workshop.”