Carlye Packer is proud to present a series of new works on paper by London-based artist Adam Stamp for the 2025 edition of Basel Social Club. This year’s edition takes place in a former private bank located in the heart of the city, on Basel’s oldest street, open June 15 - 21, 2pm to midnight, daily.  

Stamp's drawings take inspiration from the monumental mosaics and paintings of Millard Sheets that adorned many mid-century Southern California banks, many of which, like the buildings they adorned, have been razed or obscured in recent years, casualties of mergers, bankruptcies, or real estate redevelopment since Sheets’s death in 1989.

Sheets’s mosaics and murals—commissioned to beautify and mythologize financial institutions—symbolized a mid-century vision of capitalist prosperity rooted in civic optimism. Interestingly many of Millad’s bank-works had a socialist aesthetic, depicting idealized scenes of communal labor, agrarian abundance, and harmony between man and nature. In a visual language more often associated with public works or New Deal-era art, his compositions elevated the worker, celebrated craftsmanship, and suggested a shared civic purpose. These tableaux of fruit pickers, builders, and pioneers conveyed a humanist vision—one at odds with the capitalist machinery they were meant to ornament.  

Along with pictures inspired by Sheets’s bank murals, Stamp has culled from his ongoing image archive to present six new works, all with reference to fortune, abundance, leisure, or labour. Like the Sheets images, Stamp retains a certain tension which speaks to the ruins of the banking institution. Each is presented on custom, hand letterpressed paper, made in collaboration with Salt & Cedar Studios, Paris, whose proprietor, Megan O’Connell, was Stamp’s typography and letterpress professor in his first year of university.