The Signs Are Good: 20 years of painting the future

Bathurst Regional Art Gallery presents The Signs Are Good: 20 years of painting the future by Adam Norton.

Sometimes it seems like science fiction is coming true!

From the Atomic Age to UFOlogy, and to our own dreams and expectations of the Space Age, Adam Norton reflects on versions of the future and how they have changed over time. His paintings fix on aspects we might have missed.

He has visited Maralinga and Woomera in the South Australian desert, where the British government conducted their nuclear and rocket tests in the post-war era. He has visited some of the world’s UFO hot spots like Roswell and Area 51 in the USA. He has made special pilgrimages to where outer space collided with our planet at the two largest meteor craters in the world, in Arizona and Wolfe Creek in Western Australia.

Norton is part-anthropologist and part-futurologist as he remakes visions of the future into large colourful acrylic paintings. The works are influenced by the book covers, film posters and scientific billboards of the sci-fi and Space Age era he has lived through. The Signs Are Good is a canny retelling of our shared fantasy of the future.

Adam Norton was born in the United Kingdom. He grew up in Lagos, Nigeria and Nairobi, Kenya. In 1984 he was awarded a BfA from The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University. He has lived and worked in Gadigal/Sydney, since 2002. Adam has exhibited widely in Australia and overseas and his work spans painting, installation, video and public art.

Norton’s work has been included in the Daejeon Biennale, South Korea, in 2016, and the Canberra Art Biennial in 2022. Institutional exhibitions include MAXIMUM MADNESS: Art Inspired by Mad Max at Rockhampton Museum of Art (2024), Giant Leap at Casula Powerhouse (2019), Beyond Belief: The Sublime in Contemporary Art at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (2017), and the solo exhibition My Trip to Mars at UTS Gallery (2015). He has been a finalist in many national art prizes including The Archibald Prize and The Doug Moran Portrait Prize. Norton has completed public art commissions for City of Sydney and Sydney Metro, and his work is held in the collections of Sydney Town Hall, Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre, Wollongong Art Gallery, University of Technology Sydney, Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery, Griffith University Art Collection, and Artbank.

https://www.adamnorton.net/