With my work, I think about making something that is energetically real and energetically alive […] Everything already exists. We don’t need to make anything up, it is all here. My work is more about conjuring, what has been lost or destroyed, visible again.
Marina Adams (b. 1960, Orange, New Jersey) is an abstract painter who lives and works in New York City and Bridgehampton, New York and Parma, Italy, and whose works explore the ways in which pattern and colour structure space. Her vibrant paintings draw inspiration from culturally and historically diverse materials, architecture, music, and poetry, spanning Native American arts, including pottery and weavings, to Uzbek textiles. Her compositions, which often feature interwoven shapes that resemble lozenges, leaves, or waves, seem to be passages cut from a larger fabric—and yet, each canvas is brilliantly resolved. Moving between dissonance and harmony, symmetry and irregularity, her paintings generate tangible energy. As she works, she enters a dialogue with forebears like Henri Matisse, Joan Mitchell, Alma Thomas, Willem de Kooning, and Hilma af Klint. Adams works on paper with crayon or charcoal before approaching the canvas, beginning with a drawn structure and then working organically and responsively to continue opening her forms up to new realms of interpretation. She also paints small format gouache works on paper in the hills of Italy which inform the work she makes in her New York studio. In her paintings, colour is never flat, but is built up slowly with various modes of paint application to achieve a dynamic luminosity.
Adams has collaborated on publications with poets such as Norma Cole, Charles Bernstein, Vincent Katz, Leslie Scalapino, and Christian Prigent. She received her BFA from Tyler School of Art and her MFA from Columbia University; and she 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).
