Adam Harrison Debuts Tabletop Edition of The Painting Game at Museion Bolzano for ICOM Day 2026

Key facts

• The Painting Game was presented for the first time in a new tabletop format at Museion in Bolzano on the occasion of ICOM Day 2026, themed Museums Unite in a Divided World.
• The project had previously been shown at coleção moraes-barbosa in São Paulo (2024), the Fridericianum in Kassel (2025) and the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2026).
• The game kit includes a deck of instruction cards, postcard-format blank sheets, a small watercolour set and two brushes in a pocket-sized box.
• The first edition of The Painting Game consists of five hundred copies.
• Harrison worked with graphic designer Nerijus Rimkus on the game's visual identity, developing numerous prototypes tested with children, elderly people, educators, therapists, professional artists and non-art audiences.
• Harrison opened a new chapter in 2023 after ten years working under the name Studio for Propositional Cinema.
• An early version of the game was presented at coleção moraes-barbosa as a participatory sculptural installation with oil sticks and canvases; a watercolour version followed after Cacau Barbosa purchased a watercolour set during exhibition preparations.
• The interview with Giulia Pollicita was conducted via message exchange in July 2026, while Pollicita was in Naples and Harrison was building a labyrinth on Pantelleria.
• The Decommissioned Games, painted panels based on pre-existing board games with language removed, were shown at Current Plans in Hong Kong in the group exhibition "Imagine a Dead Blue Whale Inside the Pocket of a Giant", co-curated by Giulia Pollicita and Eunice Tsang.
• Harrison cited Duchamp's chess, Situationist psychogeography, the surrealist cadavre exquis and Oulipo as precedents for play as a strategy for imagining alternative worlds.