Justin Adian

About five years ago, the New York artist Justin Adian found some foam filling on the street. Inspired, he brought it to his Brooklyn studio, intending to make a sculpture. “It didn’t work,” Adian says of the finished product, which looked like a cushion mounted on a wall—or, worse yet, the work of the American artist John Chamberlain. “I liked it, but it wasn’t mine.” So Adian, 37, turned to what felt familiar. “Because I think like a painter, my solution was to stretch canvas over the foam.”

Adian’s stretched canvases crease like skin around the edges of squared cushions, soft-edged planks, and rectangular bolsters in wall pieces that have attracted big collectors like Michael Ovitz. Sometimes their parts overlap; other times they are designed to be placed in a corner. “I think of my work as paintings, but I have no problem with people calling them sculptures,” he says. Next year, Adian’s installation at Lever House in New York will run concurrently with a solo show at the National Exemplar gallery in TriBeCa. His engagement with the Lever House’s Gordon Bunshaft–designed architecture will no doubt bring up the same question: painting or sculpture? Adian is happy about the ambiguity: “If you’re not sure what something is, it gives you a lot of freedom.”