In modulating, intense hues, Marina Adams’s abstract paintings explore pattern as a language that exceeds boundaries. Finding similarities in such diverse cultural output as American Southwest pottery, North African weavings and mosaics, and ancient Egyptian architecture, she reconceives designs as radiant arrangements of color. “We can see pattern in the most basic things,” she has explained, “it’s in basic truths that we can find communion.” Her canvases feature fields of interlocking shapes, both biomorphic and geometric, that appear to flex, expand, and contract in their assigned colors. The artist, who is based in New York and Parma, Italy, invests in the physicality of painting, making her process visible in the work itself. Animated by a steady, dynamic energy, she conveys immense experiences with pared down means, much like her forebears Agnes Martin, Alma Thomas, and Hilma af Klint.

Born in 1960 in Orange, New Jersey, Adams received her BFA from Tyler School of Art (1980) and her MFA from Columbia University (1983). She has collaborated with poets on several volumes, including Actualities with Norma Cole (Litmus Press, 2015); Taormina with Vincent Katz (Kayrock, 2012); The Tango with Leslie Scalapino (Granary Books, 2001); and Vue sur Mer with Christian Prigent (Gervais Jassaud, 2010). Her work was recently featured in Affinities for Abstraction: Artists on Eastern Long Island, 1950 to 2020, Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2021) and FOCUS: Marina Adams, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2020). Her work resides in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Longlati Foundation, Shanghai. Adams is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (2016) and the Award of Merit Medal for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2018).