NEW YORK—An exhibition of landscape-based paintings and works on paper by Adam Straus will be on view at Nohra Haime Gallery, 500 West 21st Street, in Chelsea from June 26 through July 31, 2025. An opening exhibition and book signing will be held on Wednesday, July 16 from 6:00-8:00 p.m. during the ADAA Chelsea and Tribeca Gallery Walk.

Adam Straus: Looking for Some Good News presents work from 2009 through 2025, showing the artist’s long-standing engagement with landscape. Created with a spirit of experimentation, the work reflects an appreciation and celebration of the natural world contrasted with a strong interest in the politics of our time.

Straus’s sensitivity to nature and the changing seasons is heightened by his childhood experiences. Raised in South Florida, where climate shifts are minimal, he approaches the Northeast spring and summer with particular attentiveness. Now based on Long Island’s East End, he returns each year to the motifs of light, growth, and transformation, responding to the landscape as it comes briefly and vividly into bloom. Straus has said that his Florida childhood emersed in the natural world combined with a politically active family were the two most important influences to his life as an artist.

“The older I get the more I am amazed at the beauty of the natural world surrounding us. Every year the miracle of spring brings an unbelievable feeling of rebirth. Many of my paintings stem from that,” Straus notes. “Occasionally we get to leave our habitats and really get out in it, so to speak, away from human intrusion where you can hear the inside machinery of your mind in the quiet. And when that happens, you begin to realize just how silly we often are. It humbles you and put us in our place. I think that this sense of being immersed in nature is being forgotten and is harder to find, which disturbs me and fuels my work.”

Straus sometimes paints over collages of newspapers and grocery shopping lists to contrast our day-to-day lives with the glories of nature. His great concern about environmental issues inspired his “glitch” paintings. He sends a landscape painting through an app that partially breaks up the image, he then selections portions of the pattern to use in his paintings, resulting in a metaphor for human destruction of the natural world.