Image: Chefas Projects, Portland
Chefas Projects will present ‘Galvanized,’ the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Portland artist Bobby Adams, from September 18 through October 17, 2026. The exhibition brings together seven new gradient paintings.
The paintings extend Adams’s ongoing investigation into color, movement, precision, and reduction. Working with hard edges and meticulously calibrated color transitions, Adams constructs paintings that appear at once exacting and elusive.
Color becomes both subject and structure in Adams’s work, with gradients shifting across the surface with a measured sense of movement. Simplified compositions heighten the perceptual effects of scale, saturation, and transition.
The paintings inhabit a productive space between the mechanical and the handmade, where precision does not eliminate the presence of the artist but makes it more apparent. ‘Galvanized’ marks an important step in Adams’s relationship with the gallery, following his inclusion in multiple group exhibitions and establishing a sustained presentation of his practice through a focused body of new work.
In ‘California Poppy,’ the color relationships carry the visual charge of racing culture while being distilled through Adams’s pared-down formal language. Across the exhibition, speed is suggested rather than depicted, and movement emerges from the most economical means.
