Adam Handler

Adam Handler was born in Queens NY and grew up on Long Island. As a young child and adolescent, he spent countless hours at his grandparents' framing factory in New York City. There, his passion for the arts grew and it became inevitable that he too would discover the many possibilities of art.

Using acrylic paint, oil stick, pencil, and markers, Handler’s child-like and passionate drawing technique produces distinctive outlined characters which almost appear flat, with little to no depth of field. The backgrounds of his works are highly detailed, but rough, vigorously drawn with scratches and markings that appear to spill over the edge of the canvas, conveying a hurried and improvised feeling. Willem De Kooning’s works provided Handler with an “ah-ha” moment: a figure does not have to look like a figure, but can rather reflect the qualities of one. Handler’s large-scale imaginative figures connect viewers to a feeling of warm nostalgia, or even a sense-memory from days long ago.