New York, NY –– WHAAM! presents Heatstroke Candy, a group exhibition organized by Abella D'Adamo, featuring works by Chris Martin, COCO144, LAWE/ Sub 5 aka Chris Capuozzo, Chloée Maugile, Abella D’Adamo, Hunter Ney, Ruth Angel Edwards, and Wombat. On view from July 18 through August 22, 2025.

Heatstroke Candy conjures the delirious, overheated ecstasy of summer in the city: a sensory overload of lust, disaster, dream logic, and neon-slick madness. It’s a show about being alive outside, when reality warps in the humidity and anything—romance, danger, transcendence—feels possible.

This is the world seen through sun-glared eyes: sunlight stabbing your face, the metallic stink of hot pavement, sweat trickling down your back. You sip something freezing and sugary while watching strangers spiral, flirt, shout, disappear. The street becomes a stage. The mood is chaotic, dreamy, hyperreal.

Featuring artists who speak fluently in color, iconography, and emotional intensity, the exhibition radiates with heat and urgency. Chris Martin’s ecstatic abstractions thrum with texture and spiritual force, while COCO144 and LAWE aka Chris Capuozzo channel their legendary graffiti lineage into walls alive with motion and coded poetry. Chloée Maugile and Abella D’Adamo conjure explosive, glittering scenes rich with cinematic allusion, musical echoes, fantasy, and obsession. Hunter Ney dissects pop culture’s decay and its manufactured myths, and Ruth Angel Edwards weaves punk incantation with a kind of feminist media shamanism. Wombat brings their signature energy indoors with a new painting that translates the chaotic rhythms of the street into a feral, heat-drunk canvas pulsing with defiance and delirium.

Heatstroke Candy is sweet, volatile, and unnerving—like a fever you don’t want to break. It’s a show about what happens when our internal worlds spill out into the streets, cracked open by heat, hunger, and hope.

About Abella D’Adamo

Abella D’Adamo (b. 1999) is an emerging multidisciplinary artist from Melbourne, Australia. Abella’s practice spans over the mediums of airbrush painting, illustration, videography, styling, and direction. 

Abella’s endeavours to create an interactive experience when viewing her work. Interested in hypnotisation, Abella uses vortexes and portals in her work to seduce her viewers. Whether that be through illusory psychedelic patterns, exploring the erotica of artificial food aesthetics, and the complexities of objectification in her hypersexual figurative characters, her practice aims to create a pulsating quality that encourages viewers to become aware of their own lust, discomfort, euphoria or darkness.