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The Arts Intel Report

Pat Adams: Large Paintings

Pat Adams, Such That, 2008.

Mar 11 – Apr 22, 2023
291 Grand Street, New York, NY 10002, United States

“I see parallels between her work and a consistent transcendental strand in modernism leading from Paul Klee through Joseph Beuys to Anselm Kiefer,” said the scholar and museum director Robert Wolterstorff of the artist Pat Adams, in 2017, “both an acute sensitivity to material and fracture and a deep sense of meaning and allusion.” Adams was born in Stockton, California, in 1928. After college in her home state, she moved around, studying art in Chicago, in Brooklyn, winning a Fulbright to France, and then heading to Bennington College, in Vermont, where she would teach and paint for a good 30 years, and where she still lives and paints. Her work is abstract—curves, dapples, skeins, mists, the known and the unknown meeting mysteriously. This exhibition focuses on paintings larger than 100 inches in width. The critic Roberta Smith calls Adams, who is now 94, the “Jan van Eyck of postwar American abstraction.” —Laura Jacobs

Photo courtesy of Alexandre Gallery