Stroma Funk, Charlie Adams’ first solo show after graduating from the Royal College of Art, is now open in London.

Stroma Funk: Charlie Adams at Union Gallery

Union Gallery presents Stroma Funk, an exhibition by Charlie Adams, curated by Shane Bradford. Now open in Bethnal Green, London, the exhibition runs from 10 October to 7 November 2026.

Stroma Funk, Charlie Adams’ first solo show after graduating from the Royal College of Art, is now open in London.

The exhibition of high gloss surfaces with plant-like abstract structures and small wall-mounted reliefs constitutes an intuitive response to the inherent logic of nature, contemporary art, and the supernatural.

A large multi-layered aluminium resin panel dominates the small white cube space, accompanied by a parade of wall-mounted sculptures, cast from unspecified root-balls in unlikely colours – bright but slightly off, on the verge of decomposition, or at least on the turn.

The overall effect for the viewer is of chancing upon a secret garden, whose growth, indifferent to human presence, nonetheless carries a trace of the Anthropocene world. The wall sculptures, retain the shape of the mould, an incongruous rectangle amidst the natural chaos. Tendrils entrapped in the painting are arrested in time, exuding a supernatural gloss suggestive of organic samples suspended in timeless amber.

Stroma Funk is a quiet riot of sensations just at the periphery of our senses. The intrigue is in the tantalising separation between our natural selves and a proposed future-self, disconnected and imperceptibly altered. The meaning is in the silence of deep time, and the biological procession running parallel to life experience; two trains on lateral tracks converging momentarily before peeling away. The mood is subtle and experiential, independent of pedagogy, yet reminding us of so much.

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