The Brooklyn Rail

Pat Adams’s current show at Alexandre represents the latest manifestation of a laudable and important trend: showing coherent episodes or moments in the career of venerable artists. As this practice continues to gain momentum, it can only bring attention to overlooked work and to forgotten chapters in the history of American painting. Kasmin Gallery recently presented the abstractions Jane Freilicher (1924–2014) produced between 1958 and 1962 and, more recently, Lelong showed the work the Argentine artist Sarah Grilo (1917–2007) painted in New York between 1962 and 1970. Now Alexandre Gallery has opted for a parcel of paintings by Pat Adams (b. 1928) made during the 1950s and ’60s, the decades when American art, especially in New York, was coming into its own. All American in the most inclusive sense, these three women, especially Pat Adams, show themselves to be pathfinders in the diversification of abstract art.

Whenever I look at an Adams work, I always have the impression I’m peering through a microscope at some engrossing specimen. It is as if there were some greater corpus from which these pieces have been excised, suggesting that Adams has elected to present us with this particular sample, captured in her esthetic lens. This signature technique perhaps helps to explain why the current show looks unbelievably fresh, even though the earliest piece is from 1952 and the latest from 1969.

An untitled 1952 gouache on paper particularly demands our attention. A modest 13 by 9 inches, it reflects an early 1950s concept of painterly space in a way the other works included here do not. First a field, then black glyphs inscribed on it in quasi-totemic order, the totality looking like an inscription in some archaic alphabet. The example of William Baziotes (1912–1963) comes to mind. It is as if Adams had abandoned the idea of still life, but still regarded the canvas as a table-like surface on which she could stage selected items. The rune-like hieroglyphics may allude to some particular meaning, but those concepts have been lost along with the language in which they were written.

The work of the later 1950s is another kettle of fish. The blank field with inscribed characters has vanished, and now all that matters is Adams’s absolute control over the entire surface, the space she has allotted to herself. The Gyres II (1957), gouache on paper, looks like a slice of marble. The word “gyre” is loaded: first because it identifies the many circles, vortices, or whirlpools Adams affixes to her painting, and second because for people of Adams’ generation the word gyre would automatically conjure William Butler Yeats’s 1919 poem “The Second Coming”—for Yeats a reaction to the horrors of World War I, for later generations an allusion to imminent nuclear disaster. Ground Sounding (1959), a gouache and graphite on paper, also has ominous overtones. Ground sounding means drilling into the soil to see what it’s made of or, more likely in this case, putting your ear to the ground to hear things you otherwise might miss. The black graphite field contains mysteries, possibly dangers, to which only Adams is sensitive.

The work from the 1960s, especially Morning Entrance (1969), another gouache on paper, fully reflects Adams’s microscopic vision. Like a cross-section of some fossil-bearing slice of limestone, the work is filled with scattered spots, pieces of mica fixed in the rock, while the arrowhead shaped configurations seem to mark the lost presence of some biological entity. Long Short Locations (1968) returns us to the enigmas of the early 1950s. A yellow, speckled field in landscape mode is punctuated by two lines. On the left margin, a substantial ochre-ish column seems to mark a limitation or endpoint, while on the right, but not at the edge, a wiggly lighter ochre line ambiguously suggests either a new border or a fracture point in a marble slab. The paradoxical title leaves us hanging, which is exactly where we want to be as we study this unsettled and brilliant piece.

The twenty-three works in this show are small in scale, with the largest, Ingress and the Rivet (1961), measuring 48 by 44 inches. An innocent visitor might conclude that Adams limited herself in terms of size, unlike her exuberant male contemporaries. The exact opposite is the case, as the Alexandre Gallery’s 2023 show of Adams’s larger paintings demonstrated. Pat Adams’s career encompasses decades of artistic production, but her production is not limited to one fashion or to the style of a particular group or school. She is her own artist, unique and independent from her powerful contemporaries, an example for us all.