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FOCUS: Marina Adams


Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

For more than a decade, Marina Adams has explored the relationships between color and form. In her acrylic-on-linen paintings, biomorphic forms dovetail, each structure distinguished by a solid field of color. Each painting has its own distinct palette, with diverse and unusual color combinations. While Adams sketches out her forms in charcoal before she paints, her work has an immediacy evidenced by loose, confident swathes of paint, where drips mark the canvases and bands of color overlap, creating a balance between organization and improvisation. Though often perceived as nonreferential, her compositions are prompted by textile design and architectural forms. As she states, “One of the reasons I allow my love of pattern to be predominant in the paintings is that pattern is a language that crosses boundaries. It offers common ground. I think it’s interesting that similar patterns were utilized in different places around the world, places that most likely didn’t have physical contact. We can see pattern in the most basic things and I guess what I love is that it forces you to get very basic, and it’s in basic truths that we can find communion. We find how we’re alike, as opposed to always thinking about how we’re different.” Literature and poetry play a large role in Adams’s work, especially in the artist’s use of referential titles, which offer viewers another path of entry into her works. As Adams has said of her titles, “I think they’re particularly important if you’re not giving a narrative, if you’re not giving a storyline, if you’re just presenting an experience—particularly in a literal world, and we’re in a very literal world, particularly in the West, where people want and believe in reason and ideas. I’m not giving them either. Language can exist, in the same way that color can exist; it can just be.”

Marina Adams was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1960 and lives between New York and Parma, Italy. She earned a BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, and an MFA from Columbia University, New York. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at Salon 94, New York; Galerie Gris, Hudson, New York; CUE Art Foundation, New York; and Magazzino d’Arte Moderna, Rome. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at the Camden Arts Centre, London; Lisson Gallery, New York; American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; and The Center for Contemporary Art, Bedminster, New Jersey. Adams received the Award of Merit Medal for Painting from the Academy of Arts and Letters and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

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3200 Darnell Street · Fort Worth, TX 76107


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