Pat Adams: Works from the 1970s and 80s

Pat Adams 1970s and 80s

Pat Adams, c. 1973. Photo: Matthew Longo

Pat Adams WORKS FROM THE 1970S AND 80S

Pat Adams, 1985. Photo: Abe Frajndlich

Pat Adams WORKS FROM THE 1970S AND 80S

A l e x a n d r e Ga l l e r y 724 Fifth Avenue, 4th floor (at 57th) New York 10019 212.755.2828

www.alexandregallery.com

We hope that you, your families and loved ones are safe and well during this very challenging time. Our gallery family—artists and staff—are all adjusting to new and creative ways of living and working. Until we can re-open our physical space to the public, we will regularly present works through e-catalogues and our new Virtual Viewing Room (alexandregallery.com). We also invite you to follow-us on Instagram @alexandregallery where we are now posting updates on each of our artists. In the meantime, we are all working remotely and can be reached by e-mail at inquiries@ alexandregallery.com.

The gallery’s first exhibition of Pat Adams (American, b. 1928) paintings and drawings from the 1970s and 80s was scheduled to open a few weeks ago and will be re-presented next season. The show was to include twenty-two works and mark the first major New York showing of Adams’s work since 2008 and the close of her longtime dealer Zabriskie. This e-catalogue may serve to introduce Pat Adams to our audience. Next season we look forward to producing an expanded printed exhibition catalogue with texts

by John Yau and Faye Hirsch.

Over decades Pat Adams has developed a complex abstract visual vocabulary to explore metaphysical ideas in both her large-

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scale paintings and intimate works on paper. Adams’s worldview, combined with an intense focus on visuality and an awareness of the psychology of perception—how we see, feel, and comprehend the world—has its origins during her childhood in California and was solidified in her years of study at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to art, Adams studied anthropology, paleontology, psychology, and physics, which impressed her both on the complexity of the phenomenal world, and the significance of primary, intrinsic constructs in how we perceive and comprehend that world. After graduating Berkley in 1949, Adams moved to New York, where she began to study the painting of Kandinsky and Mondrian at the Guggenheim and the works of Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art. She attended classes at the Brooklyn Museum Art School where she studied with Max Beckmann, John Ferren and Reuben Tam. Since the mid-fifties, Adams has explored a core vocabulary of abstract geometric forms that have been embedded in undefined fields of glistening colors. Her imagery often includes circles, curves, lines, arabesques, squares, and variations of spherical shapes. She often enhances the material quality of her paintings by mixing sand, mica, eggshells and other natural materials into her pigments, 8

creating both deep and shallow spaces; mysterious transparency and physicality. Adams has developed her own language and system of poetics that has been revealed in her titles and writings to describe qualities in her work: “quiddity or whatness, richesse, the once again begin again, towardness, involuntary affect, slowing, apparency, delayed closure, autogenous bursts, and the ‘not-as-yet.’”

This system of poetics has described by artist and critic Mario Naves as “verbs.” He writes: The metaphysical underpinnings of these dense and delicate pictures divulge themselves gradually. Adams illuminates what are often abstruse avenues of philosophical thought, yet doesn’t put a fine point on them. Her pictures are particular as they are elusive, and she thrives on paradox.

While Adam’s paintings often have an immediate, even visceral impact on the viewer, their great strength may rest in their ability to draw viewers in and keep them visually, mentally, and emotionally engaged over long periods of looking, thinking and feeling. Her work has a unique core that confront the viewer, asking to give their exclusive attention to what is before their eyes, so that they focus more on the painting and not on the search for outside 9

references. Her works asks the viewer to observe what happens when a wire-thin line journeys into an undefined field, or when jolts of color move in a parabolic trajectory across the canvas.

The critic Lance Esplund has said of Adams’s work: One of the most startling things about Ms. Adams’s works is that their flat surfaces, as active, various and sometimes seemingly chaotic as they are, still maintain clockwork precision and clarity. It’s as if we were seeing the stages of growth or the steps of transformation, each accompanied by its gaseous residue or shed skin.

On the works featured in our current show, John Yau writes: The overlapping transparent and semi-transparent layers, the multitude of abstract vocabularies engaging with each other in various ways, become an invitation to immerse oneself in the many different pleasures and possibilities that her paintings bring together. On every scale, Adams’s work invites a slow contemplative engagement, which runs counter to the quick visual consumption of a signature image or motif, which has become a commonplace experience in today’s art world.

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Adams’s drawings and paintings have been the subject of more than thirty one-person shows in New York since the mid1950s. Since the early 1960s Adams has lived in Vermont, where she enjoyed a long teaching career at Bennington College. She lives in an historic Victorian home with lush gardens, a pond, surrounded by the Green Mountains. The environment is graceful and includes a rich blend of colors, textures and shapes—as those integrated in her work. However, Adams has said that her longtime surroundings are only but one aspect of her work. While a place enhances, it does not ultimately inform the subject of her painting. It provides the solitude required to reflect on herself, disengage from the mainstream and view from a distance the issues that occupy the world.

—Alexandre Gallery, March 2020

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CATALOGUE

1 Glistening Drowse, 1970, gouache on paper, 17½ x 15½ inches

2 Errand of Honey, 1971, gouache on paper, 20 x 10 inches

3 More So When, 1971, oil, isobutyl methacrylate and mica on linen, 68 x 68 inches

4 See What Happens, 1971, gouache on paper, 22½ x 16Ÿ inches

5 Surface Climate, 1971, gouache and pastel on paper, 21 x 8½ inches

6 Tethered Ease, 1971, oil and isobutyl methacrylate on canvas, 70 x 72 inches

7 Top and Bottom, 1971, oil, isobutyl methacrylate and mica on canvas, 77 x 24 inches

8 How it Starts, 1974, gouache on paper, 17 x 9ž inches

9 In the Way of Sense, 1977, acrylic, mica, sand and crayon on paper, 19 x 11½ inches

10 Willingness, 1977, acrylic, mother of pearl, pastel and ink on paper, 16½ x 15 inches

11 Cardinal, 1978, oil, isobutyl methacrylate, and eggshell on canvas, 80 x 86 inches

12 Avec, 1979, mixed media on paper, 19½ x 17Ÿ inches

13 Else, 1979, lithographic ink on macre Japanese paper, acrylic, eggshell, crayon and pastel on paper, 21½ x 28Ÿ inches

14 Noah’s Ark, 1979, acrylic, mica and ink on paper, 23 x 17 inches

15 Our Time, 1979, mixed media on paper, 21Âź x 29 inches

16 Au Point, 1980, acrylic, mica and eggshell on paper, 17ž x 23 inches

17 Out Come Out, 1980, oil, isobutyl methacrylate, pastel, mica, eggshell and sand on linen, 80 x 80 inches

18 Arise, 1981, acrylic, crayon and sand on paper, 23 x 18ž inches

19 Apparent, 1982, acrylic over lithograph proof on paper, 25½ x 18 inches

20 Calculus of Rhyme, 1987, acrylic, sand and pigment on paper, 187⁄8 x 16½ inches

21 Interstitial, 1987, oil, isobutyl methacrylate, shell, mica, pigment on canvas, 80 x 131½ inches

22 Such That, 1987, mixed media on paper, 113⁄16 x 157⁄8 inches

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Pat Adams: Works from the 1970s and 80s March 14 thorugh April 25, 2020

This exhibition will be re-presented by the gallery during the 2020–2021 season.

Alexandre Gallery 724 Fifth Avenue, 4th floor New York, New York 10019 212-755-2828 www.alexandregallery.com Front cover: Interstitial, cat. no. 20 (detail) Back cover: Calculus of Rhyme, cat. no. 20 (detail)

Images © Pat Adams Catalogue © Alexandre Fine Art Inc. No portion of this catalogue, images or text may be reproduced, either in printed or electronic form, without the expressed written permission of the gallery.

Editorial Production: Marie Evans and Maria Stabio Photographic Production: Maria Stabio Design: Lawrence Sunden, Inc.