Documentation

Adam Patrick Grant’s paintings emerge from his extensive archive of street photography, comprising tens of thousands of frames captured over several years. From these visual notes of civic life, he filters brief glimpses of essential, base human emotions. The current series focuses on moments where love or intimacy surface in public space, either directly or obliquely.

The figures depicted are based on individuals photographed without formal consent. While their likenesses have been altered to avoid direct identification, Grant acknowledges that anonymity does not erase the ethical complexities of representation—particularly as an artist engaging with diverse identities and experiences. The work does not seek to define these subjects’ stories or impose rigid narratives. Instead, it documents his own perspective as a curious but privileged observer, aware of the power dynamics at play.

Set against the backdrop of London, a city characterised by surveillance, hyper-visibility and relentless observation, the works foreground the tension between private interiority and public readability. Grant is attentive to the idea that we are ceaselessly captured—by cameras, by glances, by projections—and that these fleeting moments can accrue narrative weight in ways we cannot control. As with the street photography of Walker Evans or Jill Freedman, or Sophie Calle’s sociological investigations of strangers, each painting becomes a surface onto which viewers may inevitably project and question their own histories, preconceptions and emotional architectures.

Despite their apparent accessibility, the paintings resist closure. They contain within them internal contradictions—tenderness collides with estrangement, familiarity with opacity—offering no singular reading but instead insisting on a durational engagement. Grant emphasizes that the people depicted are not symbols or archetypes; they are real individuals briefly encountered and portrayed. Throughout this he welcomes critique and conversation around authorship, spectatorship, and the unstable ethics of looking: How do we see each other? What meanings do we attach to strangers? And what remains unknowable, even in full view?

Adam Patrick Grant (b.2000) is an artist living in London. Recent exhibitions include Screens at 243 Luz (2024) and Condo at Arcadia Missa (2025)