Last Thursday contributing editor Adam Helms' solo exhibition, "Without Name," opened at Marianne Boesky Gallery in Manhattan. It features a series of 48 charcoal portraits following Gerhard Richter’s 48 Portraits (1971-72). Whereas Richter's paintings represent a pantheon of twentieth-century cultural and political figures, Helms' drawings portray the shadowy figures of insurgents, terrorists, guerillas, subversives, whose individual identities are shrouded—both by masks and by technological mediation—and who exist primarily as archetypes.
"Without Name," which is open until December 18, builds on Helms's past investigations of the iconography of radical groups, including "Milestones: The Noble Lie," his contribution to Triple Canopy's fourth issue, War Money Magic. Through an interactive bank of images and texts, that project examined the symbiotic relationship between the works and lives of Egyptian militant Sayyid Qutb and American political philosopher Leo Strauss, and the visions they've spawned.