Marina Adams
Two Palms is pleased to present our first major project with Marina Adams, a series of monotypes of free-flowing patterns that highlight the artist’s ability to fluently push color into form.
Adams utilizes a distinct palette of rich, saturated hues to create biomorphic forms that undulate and press together with pulsating energy. Sampling motifs from textile design, architecture, and postmodern poetry, as well as Moorish mosaics like the tessellated walls in the Alhambra palace in Grenada, Spain, Adams responds to color and form as she paints, resulting in a rhythmic relationship between the two. When speaking about her work, Adams has said that abstraction creates space for thought, rather than dictating it; it opens up the opportunity for experience.
Color is just about everything in Adams’s work, and everything seems animated, in movement. The energy impelling this motion is never agitated or frantic but rather feels steady, relaxed, and spontaneously responsive. Viewing her work is like being in the passenger seat next to a driver who knows how to take the road with supreme dexterity and implicit attentiveness; you feel safe at any speed.
- Barry Schwabsky in Artforum
There’s something about color, it’s unlike everything else. I can break painting down and talk about drawing and scale, surface and touch, among other things, but there’s something about color that you can’t describe. When it’s powerful it holds the spirit, maybe like great music.
- Marina Adams discusses her work with Alex Bacon for the Brooklyn Rail
What’s great about printing - particularly at Two Palms - is that it’s very playful. You go into your zone, and its different: you’re not in your studio, it’s not paint on canvas, and there is always a surprise element. For example, the image is flip flopped. It’s the mirror image that prints, and you can never tell by looking at the plate what the print will look like when it comes out of the press. I think that pushes you to experiment, and that’s just fantastic.
- Adams speaks with Barry Schwabsky for the Between Two Palms podcast
In an age in which increased human sensibility has become such an obvious need in all areas of human involvement, color sensitivity and awareness can constitute a major weapon against forces of insensitivity and brutalization.
- From a review of Josef Albers' seminal text Interaction of Color
