Sabhan Adam’s work is tinged with a self-proclaimed ‘Orwellian’ character, as can be seen in this figure above. The artist borrows from Klimt’s famous gold shroud and subverts its opulence with the supernatural and the othered. His figures, less human and more creature-like, appear endowed with a kind of anatomical monstrosity.
Much of Sabhan Adam’s work could be interpreted as a creative rebellion against the status quo. One may suspect that his figures are a riot against the sanitary propriety of frolicking ladies and gentlemen in idealist art. Indeed, Adam’s figures are mutative as they thread the line between subjective humanity and something othered, a poignant sense of Kafkaesque interiority.
When one looks up Sabhan Adam, there are a number of things one finds: fear, phobia, the monstrous; protest and mutiny. These are all key concepts in Adam’s work which stretches the boundaries of human emotion in a way that morphs the physicality of his characters. There is a powerful sense of paranoia and angst in this particular image, as this figure seems to have a number of heads facing in different direction, with multiple pairs of eyes, all set with frantic fixation.
