Blue Head is a requiem in blues and greys with flashes of white and mauve. Every feature of the countenance embodies the effect of torture, as symbolised by the sinewy electric lines in contrast with the blotches of blues and greys. The eyes are without sight, while the mouth stutters wordless sounds. — Elza Miles

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Adams returned to Cape Town to work on a new body of work. As a result, his work reflected on South Africa, and in many senses, it re-evoked his practice from the late 1950s. As he stated in an interview, he wanted to create a body of work that ‘people of this city [Cape Town] could identify with.’ He would go on to confess that, in coming back to the city he had grown up in, he could not avert his eyes from the downtrodden and those that had suffered during apartheid. It was their experience of oppression and violence that he felt most deeply. ‘It was those visual experiences that formed the basis of my work, it still does.’

One of the themes Adams concentrated on during this period was incarceration and torture. He collected images, mainly from Africa, of incidents of human rights violations and internment. As he admitted in an interview, one of his cousins had been imprisoned on Robben Island during apartheid. Blue Head, which appeared in his show at the Iziko South African National Gallery in 2002, was one in this series.

As Alice Correia observes: ‘Throughout his artistic career … Albert Adams sought to confront the realities of human cruelty. He was deeply moved by, and responded to the horrors of war and genocide perpetrated across the world — from South African apartheid to the Iraq War.’