Over decades Pat Adams (American, b. 1928) has developed a complex abstract visual vocabulary to explore metaphysical ideas in both her large-scale paintings and intimate works on paper.

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, 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.’”

Adams’s drawings and paintings have been the subject of more than thirty one-person shows in New York since the mid-1950s. Since the early 1960s Adams has lived in Vermont, where she enjoyed a long teaching career at Bennington College.

Pat Adams Press
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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.

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 references. Her works ask 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.