by Carolina Sculti, studio photos by Ryan Molnar // May 19, 2026
I was dropped off under a cold drizzle on Gottlieb-Dunkel-Straße, squinting up to the bright grey sky and the eight stories of minty green concrete that make up Greenhouse Berlin. I took the elevator up to Adam Fearon’s studio, a light-filled open space scattered with brushes, books and canvases of every size, where the scent of the rain-damp streets outside was replaced by paint fumes and coffee.
The greens and greys from outside bled indoors: chipped concrete floors and walls, green hues in plants, pillows and ceramic mugs and, of course, the makings of his paintings sprawled across the studio, mirroring the city’s muted palette.
Fearon has been painting in his studio for five years, a fact evidenced by the layers of multicolored splatter covering nearly every surface in the room. Central to his work is the theme of materiality—the manifestation of the power struggle between ourselves and the structures imposed upon us. Over the years, he has explored this tension across different mediums and within different spheres: technological, social and physical. His earlier work focused primarily on sculpture and installation, examining the intimate relationship between the body and technology through details such as the traces of fingerprints left on screens.
When the pandemic began and he moved into his current studio, Fearon returned to painting through a series of portraits of friends. Though markedly different in form from his earlier sculptural and installation work, these paintings emerged from the same underlying concerns. The social restrictions of the pandemic and the distance they imposed between people became the conditions that produced the work itself: portraits painted in isolation as a response to the social order of the moment.
When I asked him what a typical day in the studio looks like, he simply said: “I guess I come here and paint.” As unassuming as that sentence is, it carries an impressive focus. He works in the studio every day from around 10am to 7pm, without even a computer or desk to distract him. For a time, he even deliberately chose not to have a chair.
Since returning to painting, he has turned to the city for inspiration. In his series of Berlin works, the specificity of the scenes creates a tacit recognition for those who live here. Whether it is a sticker-covered cash machine, a graffitied DHL post box or the distinctive geometry of sidewalk tiling, his subjects draw from a shared lived environment, one shaped by the infrastructures we collectively inhabit.
One of my favorite works in his studio right now is ‘Klingelanlage,’ a detailed depiction of the notoriously changing, yellowing list of names found at the entrance of many Berlin apartment buildings. He spoke about the Klingelanlage as a structure that reflects how people are meant to live in the city—where you print out your name and fix it to the entrance as a marker of stability or belonging. But in reality, he suggested, the way people actually live often diverges from that system: names are taped over, replaced, layered; flats are sublet, occupants shift frequently. Over time, this accumulation of additions and repairs becomes visible on the surface itself, so that the structure begins to record the tension between its intended order and the realities it contains.
In his most recent series, ‘Parade,’ he moves further toward abstraction while drawing on the layered history of Tempelhofer Feld—from Prussian parade ground, to Nazi-era military use, to U.S. airbase and later an airport, now a public space of leisure. He spoke about his own interaction with the chain-link fence that became central to this body of work, where he would ride his bike along Parade Straße and look through it into the Feld at a particular point.
The fence is a structure that literally is meant to impose boundaries on us, but it’s also a metaphorical example of the fragility of those imposed divisions, in the way it can easily be broken, cut or climbed over. This tension between control and porosity is at the core of the series, and the meticulousness in his paintings intensifies that feeling, making it more immediate and grounded in experience.
What he chooses to paint seems to reflect how this theme of materiality extends across every space we move through and every surface we interact with. He spoke of moments when the politics of that become explicit—such as when a group of police officers entered the frame during a live painting session in Tiergarten—but more often, and more interesting, are the more subtle background registers that persist.
A distinctive aspect of Fearon’s work is his attention to that background condition. These are details we pass without perceiving, but once they are isolated and held in a painting with precision, they become immediately familiar as something embedded in how the city is experienced. The recognition is part of what gives the work its charge, probing our tendency to overlook what is revealed in the mundane.
My visit to his studio moved me most in the way the space so clearly reflected the concept of his work. Traces of process remained everywhere: strips of tape still stuck to the wall where works had once hung, indentations in the cushions, cups stacked on top of books, stacks of sketches behind bubble-wrapped works. And most notably, an amazing designated-for-painting outfit covered in layers of dried paint, which fit his presence so well it could have been custom-made.
His body of work is intellectually layered and impressive; he draws on a range of theoretical and literary references while remaining consistent in its underlying concerns across different forms. But what I find most inspiring is how he carries this through into the way he actually works and lives—how this attention to what wears, remains and builds up over time extends beyond the work itself, into Fearon’s relationship to his community and the city around him.
