Ceysson & Bénétière

In his newest project, Never Ever Land, Adam Himebauch hybridizes ephemeral, immersive performance art with object-based traditional painting. Beyond that, the project illustrates how Himebauch is grappling with his personal and professional history in an elegant coalescing of his past artistic ventures into this apotheosis. 

The gallery space consists of two rooms, connected by a modest hallway. One room houses five large-scale painted landscapes, simulating the experience of looking outside of a window, and the other exhibits ten collages that encircle a central area in which a bed is placed atop a large white pedestal. Himebauch will be sleeping in the bed throughout the duration of the gallery opening, the first day of a 30-day “sleep-in,” and subsequent 29 days will be live-streamed for digital viewers.

The performance element of Never Ever Land is vintage Abramović meets the contemporary digital age, combining Abramović’s generous invitation to her viewers to participate in the work, with a discerning questioning of digital disinformation that continues to become increasingly profound. Himebauch invites his viewers to observe him, physically and virtually, in his most exposed state. Beds are the objects in which we spend our most private, vulnerable, and significant moments. We sleep and dream in beds, conceive and give birth in them, get sick in them, lounge in them, are born in them, and eventually die in them. Considering the totality of these activities and conscious or unconscious states, the bed cradles our physical and spiritual selves for most of our lives. As such, the childhood bed of Himebauch will hold him for 30 consecutive days while onlookers at the opening, and digital onlookers thereafter, become his voyeurs. But are they observing what they believe they are observing? Is Himebauch actually in the bed, sleeping and lounging and being in real time, or is the footage pre-recorded and displayed in a loop? That we are even empowered to question transmutes traditional performance. When Abramović performed The Artist is Present in 2010, we knew she was present since we could see her every day, could gaze upon her billowy dress and braided hair for hours on end if we so chose. In 2023, precious little is actually present, as Himebauch comments upon by hosting the majority of his exhibition online. Without the opportunity to coexist in the same space with Himebauch in his bed, how can we believe in what we see and is it even required of Himebauch that he do what he claims to do, or is the mere suggestion enough? Perhaps by empowering his viewers to question, to think, to wonder and to discern for themselves, Himebauch is offering an even more generous, dynamic gift than one that is resolved. 

The symbolic, vulnerable resonance of the bed is echoed in the canvases that encircle it. Each of the landscapes is an abstracted memory or reverie from Himebauch’s past, revealing the intimacies of his life to an extent he has not before shared, but equally concealing those moments through their visual abstraction. Himebauch often divulges aspects of himself in his work, yet never fully. His life as urban renegade Hanksy literalizes this dialectic as Himebauch created all of the work, but through the distanced lens of a persona that he conceptualized. In his Back To The Future project, Himebauch once again incorporated aspects of himself in the work, but in a non-linear, esoteric way. As the project centered around a retrospective look back at the career of a much older Himebauch, his life and art were the apex; however, Himebauch has yet to experience the passing of those years or those milestones, therefore the man being celebrated has yet to exist. 

Throughout his career so far, Himebauch has dabbled in a complex and wonderful exploration of not only his singular “self,” but his plural “selves.” He has explored his future, created from his present, and now, looking back, he amalgamates them all with his past. 

Dr. Lizy Dastin, 2023

Link to performance Livestream:

https://www.himebauch.live/

Ceysson & Bénétière
956 Madison Avenue
10021 New York