Adam Helms

[5] Helms's work focuses on the iconography of marginalized political and social groups, and employs imagery from a range of sources: pixilated JPEGs of Chechen rebels, tintype portraits of Confederate and Union soldiers, photographs of black metal bands.

“I am interested in the ethos of violence, the romanticization of extremist ideology, and linking issues from our political past with contemporary events.”[8] Helms often depicts masked figures, using double-sided silkscreen portraits on vellum with faces obscured by pools of black ink resembling a balaclava or hood.

Helms’s Untitled (48 Portraits, 2010) (2010) depicts anonymous militiamen and combatants—the distortion of the original, online source images evident in the works—who exist on the fringes of society and represent the shadow of the rational order on view in Richter’s work.

These “fields of comparison” suggest that “representations of the modern world’s extreme fringes—images that we might imagine to break the mold of normal discourse—actually follow some of the most deeply ingrained conventions,” William S. Smith writes in a recent monograph on the artist's work.

These works often incorporate visual materials found in print publications and on the Internet, but they take the form of heralds invented by the artist—imagistic memes with a cryptic symbolism and uncanny quality.