Albert Adams: Exile and the Kingdom

According to Dr. Elena Crippa, Adams ‘was constantly reimagining, constantly bringing in new sources and new ideas. His painting and drawing is never static.’ Perhaps one of the most interesting works he produced in London in the 1980s is The Captive, 1982. As art historian Alice Correia argues, the work references the police brutality of the apartheid period, with the figure to the left in brown. However, as Correia goes on to argue, the police figure in the black uniform seems to reference what was going on in Britain at the time. The work replicates much of the press photography of the police arrests during the Brixton riots of 1981. The work, of course, could also reference his own arrests in 1950s South Africa.

The Captive, 1982, sees Adams return to a less painterly style, to the more planure or flat surfaces that he experimented with in his youth. As several art historians have suggested, Adams was also influenced by the work of David Hockney. However, the theme is far more political in nature than that of Hockney. As Correia argues, the issues addressed in the rendering of The Captive are far closer to those of a much younger group of British artists, such as the BLK Art Group and Donald Rodney. The Captive is a perfect example of the work that Adams was producing in the 1980s.

This composition is replete with three dynamic humanoid forms that fill the frame, dominated by the central figure in bright red, flanked on either side by the ominous shapes of uniforms. A strong effect of movement and force is created through the use of angular lines that run from the edges of the composition into a central point of the canvas, which have the result of drawing the viewer into the frame as the hasty figures simultaneously seem to move out of it. This masterfully creates a tension, both physical and implied, between the flat areas of bright complementary colours that seem to be pushing against each other. The menacing stance of the outside figures, authoritarian and domineering, seem to clamp the central figure. While the cool greys and greens of the background push the foreground figures forward so effectively it gives the sense of them running out of the frame into the same space the viewer occupies. To further confer suspended kinetic energy, the sense of anticipation is punctuated by the barrel of an assault rifle.

'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.' 

— Dr. 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 in which he had grown up, 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,’ he commented.

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.’