American Montage drew on Brooklyn-based artist Adam Cvijanovic’s distinctive merging of influences from nineteenth-century American landscape painting and twentieth-century cinematic techniques. The exhibition brought together a selection of Cvijanovic’s large-scale installations and paintings created over the previous fifteen years, all rendered on his signature material, Tyvek—a durable, lightweight surface more commonly found on construction sites. 

Known for his ability to blur the boundaries between the romantic and the artificial, Cvijanovic employed techniques of fracturing, cutting, layering, and sequencing to create immersive tableaux that collapsed space, time, and narrative. His work evoked the sensibilities of both epic historical panoramas and contemporary film, drawing viewers into a uniquely American visual perspective. This formal montage served as a metaphor for the fragmentation of cultural memory and collective imagination. 

The exhibition premiered three major new works. Flint Hills (2015), acquired by Kemper Museum, was inspired by Cvijanovic’s site visit to the tallgrass prairie of Kansas in fall 2014 and rendered with sweeping brushwork and evocative spatial depth. The Fall (Capri) (2015) marked a formal shift for the artist, incorporating a musical soundtrack for the first time, which added a cinematic sensibility to the experience of the work.  

Together, the works in American Montage reflected Cvijanovic’s ongoing exploration of beauty, myth, and the instability of place and identity in the American imagination.  

Press