Marina Adams: Works on Paper, Three Decades of Becoming
The progress of space and time toward shifting perceptions is explored in a 3-decade survey from Marina Adams – focusing on the works on paper that are central to her search for ‘what is’.
Image credit: Marina Adams Portrait. Photo: Grace Roselli
Marina Adams’s interest in making work that creates space for thought was an epiphany piqued while visiting Granada’s extraordinary Alhambra. She told VAULT, “I believe real change happens when a person can relax into and trust an unfamiliar experience. Opening oneself in this way allows for a real shift in perspective, which then can translate into something else.”
Her openness is palpable in this works on paper survey, which traces her process and visual interests to reveal an immersion in the transformative potential of perceived realities. The influence of the Alhambra, with its architecture and patterned surfaces sequencing changing visual cadences, may be seen in the way rhythm and immersive surfaces within Adams’s practice conduct the imagination.
Curator Raymond Foye parallels Adams’s work with Keats’s concept of negative capability. The poet promoted the idea of being comfortable with the unknown, marking a tolerance for ‘unknowing’ as essential for access to truth. As Danielle Wu writes (2017), “Adams has said she wants to create space for thought as opposed to dictating it.1
Works on Paper: A Survey at New York’s Peter Blum Gallery (until May 29) sees Adams’s abstracted imagery breathing out across several spacious galleries, the earliest works (inspired by Rome’s umbrella pines) speaking directly to the most recent, which capture space within their surfaces with colour and line, and return, differently, to nature.
1.Wu, in https://twocoatsofpaint.com/2017/02/marina-adams-radically-soft-and-optimistic.html
Image credit: Marina Adams, 1996_135x119, 1996, Installation view, Works on Paper: A Survey, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, April 9–May 29, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery
Her work conveys an influence from the natural environment despite her proximity to the city – notably her main studio in Bridgehampton, NY, a studio in the hills outside Parma, Italy and another in Brooklyn in New York City. Yet for her, “subject matter was just a vehicle to get to something else… [it] came from studying paintings and realising there was always something being communicated that was other than what was being painted.”
Her influences range from the flatness of Alez Katz’s figuration to the abstract antecedents in Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, each of whom also uses surface to convey tempo, emotion and sensation. Adams’s earliest works in this exhibition (using ink, gesso and gouache) date from 1994. After studying at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, she moved to New York in 1982, where she had a studio in the central Meatpacking District. Then, after moving to Rome in 1992, she began working on drawings (Roma 4, 5, 6 and 13, 1994) that open this survey and are inspired by the local umbrella pines with translucency and layering of the leaves, giving voice to their environmental agency.
These works culminate in the monumental 1996_135x119, 1996, which builds on a central vertical, interleaving colour and line to dominate the wall in a group of abstracted and patterned groupings. This immersive work echoes the tree canopy with shafts of light among darker areas, revealing the organic detail of vegetation, and evokes the ‘self-healing’ concepts inherent in forest ecosystems.2
The next series of works is from 2001–2009 and appears from a different register. The Erotics are collages appropriated from the Kama Sutra and Japanese Shunga, with fabric and pattern overlaid to conceal and reveal. Materials are both opaque and translucent, layered and overpainted with blocky, thick lines that meander over their surfaces.
New Alphabet (2010) is a marked departure – fresh, clean and spacious, as shapes of colour are choreographed across the wall. This return to gouache, in her Parma (northern Italy) studio during the summer, was informed by practical considerations of working elsewhere, and she found that these works allowed her to “explore, expand, play, recharge, and decompress”. Often in her work, a change of scene echoes the reinvention of travel. Small works using one colour sit apart on the wall, with their shapes mentally joined in a lively interchange that captures space well beyond.
While the stylistic shifts between bodies of work are not at first obvious progressions, particularly from the Erotics to New Alphabet, her approach to the shaping of block colour expresses a building poise and finely tuned tension between ground and painted surface.
In Adams’s view, “Each work opens up and generates the need for the next work, and they are all interconnected. Because of this, I don’t feel pressure to constantly invent new ideas. I think the work develops organically, leading itself forward.”
2. Peter Wohlleben, The Power of Trees, Black Inc., 2023.
Image credit: Marina Adams, Body and Soul, 2017 & 30x22_27, 2020, Installation view, Works on Paper: A Survey, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, April 9–May 29, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery
Body and Soul (2017) sees her adopt Flashe, its matte plasticity extending the line and allowing juxtaposed surfaces to create spatial flow. Crayon drawings in 2020 have a playful looseness that informs the gouaches that follow, with La Danse (2024) capturing musical energy in its compressed curves and lines.
The final 2 works, from 2025, see her return to the subject of trees, with 24x19_8 (2025), offering painterly gestural surfaces with a fluid translucency that evokes the held stillness of stained glass.
Foye sees these works as, “Sublimely musical yet profoundly silent. Timeless yet in the moment… All this makes sense, for these works are expressions of what is.”
Adams’s art practice crystallises for viewers a joyous instability – an embrace of the transient realities of now. Yet these works are held together by a strong central line that both defines her vision while opening the space to viewer interpretation.
In her view, “That is how the work becomes political. It has nothing to do with parties or divisive ideologies… We are in a dark time right now, and we have to see our way out of it. As an artist, that is part of my job.” This survey expresses the openness at the heart of her practice, the sense that exploring ideas, nurturing curiosity over strictures, may privilege the felt rather than the known. During a time of global instability, this permeability seems prescient.
Image credit: Marina Adams, New Alphabet, 2010, Installation view, Works on Paper: A Survey, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, April 9–May 29, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery
Adams has exhibited throughout the USA, Europe and Asia. Her institutional reputation was consolidated with an exhibition of recent work at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2020) and at Longlati Foundation, Shanghai, China (2023). Language is central to her practice, and she has collaborated with poets including Norma Cole, Charles Bernstein, Vincent Katz, Leslie Scalapino and Christian Prigent. Her work is held in public collections throughout the USA, China, and Canada and was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2016 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit Medal for Painting in 2018.
Marina Adams
Peter Blum Gallery, New York
April 9 – May 29, 2026
Works on Paper: A Survey
