For enquiries email mail@adambricusse.com

Adam Bricusse was born in London on April 4th, and grew up between Britain, France and the USA.   He was educated at St. Martins School of Art (Foundation) and The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Merton College, Oxford, gaining a BFA and an MA. He has been a practising artist since then, having worked and exhibited globally. Bricusse currently works between studios in England and France.

    Inspired by multi-layered themes with characters drawn from classical and contemporary  culture... Samurais versus monsters, modern and retro, ancient and dynamic face-offs between a variety of adversaries set against backdrops of dark mysterious forests, raging seas , angry skies and various beasts... sourced from old B movies to the finest of ancient Japanese drawings and all manner of references...

     Bricusse's work is inspired by an eclectic melange of imagery and diverse cultural forces... Incorporating Lovers and Fighters, Animals, Ancient Warriors, Pirates, Gypsies and Circus Freak Show images. Combat and love are common themes, with other-worldly Beasts and Guardians confronting each other in inverted, often mimetic, symmetry... His most recurring and all-encompassing themes... "The Reflection of Opposites" and "The Violence of Nature"... A never- ending face-off of all the conflicting elements of life, representing love and destruction, violence and passion.

"Bull terriers fly at each other amidst crashing waves, a boxer’s right hook dissolves into an idealised dream of a woman, a close-up of a pilot’s face a flash before his destruction, the impossible monochrome silhouette of a serpent’s rib-cage... Adam’s work is diverse but never miscellaneous.  The familiar becomes eccentric, the taboo is made casual. The images are sometimes mythic but projected through vivid half-memories of films and fantasies, flashes of recollection from drunken nights and sober nightmares, dreams of glorious experience, raucous humour and archetypes of child like wonder and glee. All this is the world of the Carnivale where order is subverted and desire runs free and then there is the intricate beauty of a butterfly’s wing, soundless and calm, a fragile snapshot of nature precarious and utterly lovely."

                                                                             Rowan Sommerville

   There is a voyeuristic element to Bricusse's work, inviting the viewer to travel beyond the cracked surfaces and luscious glazes of the paintings into the allegory he wants you to see and remember. The work is steeped in metaphors of life's extremes, allowing one to linger for a moment in their romantic and sensuous ideal... Where there is peace after madness, and the mysteries within become externalized, an invitation to enter a sublime world of fantastic reflection.

     Innocence and Experience, Sex and Violence, Lovers and Fighters, Life and Death, lurk magically in these multi-layered and opulent paintings... Technically they are all to varying alchemical degrees and material combinations. Some pieces are simple,  using few materials, some a symphony of many... It is the subject matter that defines the form.

Extract from Harland Millers book  INTERNATIONAL LONELY GUY

" I first met the painter Adam Bricusse at a time that was not a good time for painters.... concept art had taken over so entirely and with such speed that I’m not sure Adam - who was one of the most immersed painters I’d met - had really noticed; Adam however was indifferent to what was going on in the art world, whilst being very knowledgeable about the artists he liked, one of whom was Gaugin intact as well as Bacon - Redon and Goya , Ernst and Nolde  - he tended not to look at contemporary art but rather at life - or more specifically nature.  more specifically still it was the violence of nature that excited him as a subject... not just in art but literature and - i have to say life style.  Post The Scream - or post the reams that have been written about the Scream . It is difficult to talk with any degree of originality on the subject of man battling or being overwhelmed by the forces of nature; perhaps this in turn has put future generations off even attempting the subject, the feeling being the subject was emptied out or overdone - if that was the case then Adam seemed to see it in the opposite way - conversely he recognised in the natural world an inexhaustible subject matter in which only we - human beings - identified beauty and brutality in equal measures. As far as we know a tiger does not consider himself exquisite or his kills to be horrific - these are our pre-occupations - these are certainly Adam's pre-occupations - or at any rate they seemed that way to me though i expected i would understand a lot more about his intentions after we had spent a few months painting together  in the Bayeaux - and otherwise alone, although from studying th e local maps i saw that we were in the vicinity of Mississippi state penitentiary and had been advised not to pick up Hitchhikers  !   "  

      Having shown in many galleries over the years, Bricusse  is also a Commission Artist and has many private viewings from his studio in London. His well known series of Butterfly and Scarab paintings have evolved and progressed over the years, and are nowadays almost exclusively done as commissioned work, to be viewed from his studio rather than through galleries…

Studio Appointments and viewings can be arranged from his contacts on this website...  

       Peculiar, yet playful and sometimes sinister, his paintings are glimpses into the psyche and life of the Artist... a sensuous diary of appetites, arresting and unsqueamish.

His work is an adult candy store full of nutrition for the imagination.

     " Character is formed in the stormy billows of the world. "

 Goethe