Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Brooklyn-based conceptual painter Adam Simon is known for his cagey synthesis of the graphic symbols and tropes of commerce and civic life into elegant visual statements about the zeitgeist and, more grandly, the world as a whole. He can use text to penetrating effect, as in the small paintings he made a few years ago superimposing the edict “STEAL THIS ART” on the vintage silhouette of a policeman. In one not-quite-Hoffman-esque line and an evocative image, he captured the ambivalence and limbo of the art world between the establishment and the counterculture, having himself cultivated a live community in that space by organizing, with several other artists, the collaborative “Four Walls” events in Hoboken in the 1980s and Williamsburg in the 1990s. In “Great Figures,” his solo show now up at Osmos, he has continued in a searchingly ironic vein, now with a bemused fretfulness that affords it epochal resonance.
