Albert Adams

1929-2006

Albert Adams was a South African-born British artist whose work is shaped by questions of political power, oppression, and personal identity. Of African and Indian heritage, he was denied access to formal arts education in South Africa under apartheid, a formative experience that profoundly influenced his later practice. In 1953 Adams moved to London to take up a scholarship at the Slade School of Art. He returned to South Africa on several occasions between 1959 and the 1990s before settling permanently in London, where he combined his own artistic practice with teaching at schools and colleges. Much of Adams’s work addresses political injustice and the abuse of power, drawing on the imprisonment of friends and family members as well as wider international conflicts and human rights violations, including those in Darfur and Abu Ghraib. Alongside this explicitly political strand, he developed an ongoing series of self-portraits through which he explored questions of belonging, heritage, and identity. Adams also worked in printmaking and studied under master printer Stanley Jones, a connection that informed his engagement with the medium and his later collaborative work in print.