The Brooklyn Rail

When I spend time with Marina Adams’s work, thoughts of geometry cross into unusual territories. It’s a consequence of her use of line, which she may employ to describe shapes or specify a boundary, but she may also allow her line to do no job at all—to just be a mark. Two points are all that’s needed to define a line, yet an infinite number of lines can be made to pass through any given point. How can a sense of limitlessness merge with qualities of precision, with a sense of something absolute? At what point does something relative and fluctuating become fixed? The feeling of Adams crossing into a zone of irrevocable commitment occurs over and again, which is astonishing for an exhibition that spans more than three decades of effort.

This exhibition is the first to present a survey of Adams’s work, and the choice to focus on works on paper seems prudent. If the chronological scope is going to be broad, narrowing the range of material establishes a balance. Nonetheless, there is a lot of difference in the selection: scale shifts, paper types, paint blends, representational images, non-representational compositions. In a show like this, one seeks to discover passages of connectivity, to identify moments of disruption, because the expectation is that development occurs over time and that through a refined sample of the artist’s oeuvre, distinguishing characteristics are revealed. So then, what distinguishes Adams?

Marina Adams was born in 1960, so she was in her thirties when she painted the earliest works in the show: Roma 4, Roma 5, and Roma 13 (each 1994). Each composition is made from dark lines of India ink that flow across a smooth, gesso-white surface. The shapes of leaves—their forms stylized and reduced—appear as figures on a blank ground. Adjacent to this set hangs a massive untitled piece from 1996 wherein the leaf-shapes no longer function as figures. Their shapes can still be identified, but they are integrated into the colored ground. Leap forward twenty years to Body and Soul (2017) and the relationship of line to field—of figure to ground—becomes a kind of unity. In hindsight, it seems as if it was always meant to be, but the journey of the exhibition tells a different story.

Beginning in 2001 and continuing until 2009, Adams made collages with inkjet prints, fabric, gouache, and occasionally a bit of gold leaf, on paper. They are small, a factor that encourages close looking, which leads to a sense of intimacy. Beneath washes of color and cuts of cloth are the inkjet reproductions of Japanese Shunga and Kama Sutra drawings. Significantly, the outline Adams favored in the nineties seems rediscovered in these images. Like her drawings, they embody refined economies of line. At first, the image is more or less obscured; then it comes in and out of view for years, but by the end of the period the reproduced line is merges with the drawn line. Erotics: KS 93 (2009), included in the exhibition catalogue, seems like the grand synthesis, or a kind of breakthrough, because what comes next is titanic.

The first work a visitor to the gallery may stand before is New Alphabet (2010). Twenty sheets of handmade Indian Khadi paper are arranged in a grid. Upon each sheet Adams has painted a monochrome form, leaving notable areas of the surface untouched. As a result, a positive-negative duality becomes established, replacing the interplay of figure to ground. What we see now, and what Adams fully realizes in Body and Soul, is the absorption of the line through the meeting of two bodies. For Adams, the shift brings a new visual language into being.

The work that follows New Alphabet is formally rigorous and non-representational. There is an explosion of color and Adams seems increasingly prolific. Her compositions are now fully determined by a sense of coordination that evokes tension and balance. The elemental forces built up by a working artist—endurance, condensation, and elaboration—have become generative. Her brushwork was never fussy, but now it absolutely zips with speed and confidence. With its bold waves of color, the multi panel La Danse (2024) epitomizes these qualities. 

Incredibly, in 2025, the shapes of leaves and trees reemerge. No longer dark on light, no longer crisp and careful, Adams’s surfaces now are built from mixtures of materials: watercolor, acrylic, India ink, gouache, crayon, pencil. Accumulation occurs; color bleeds into color. She’s returned to something familiar and made it new. Once an artist achieves meaningful regeneration in their practice, they can move in almost any direction. Adams is as free as she’s ever been; it’ll be exciting to see her next steps.