Biography

Pat Adams has been using an abstract vocabulary to explore the complex and metaphysical ideas in her paintings and prints for several decades. In her paintings, Adams has reworked a core of geometric forms which have been fixed in undefined fields of color. Her imagery often includes circles, curves, lines, squares, and variations of spherical shapes. Additionally, through the mixing of sand and mica into her pigments, Adams enhances the material quality of her works. The repeated geometric elements in her works are what she calls “ur forms” and they have helped her to develop her own poetic language revealed in her titles, writings, and talks, to describe the qualities in her works she strives to achieve: “quiddity or whatness, richesse, towardness, involuntary affect, slowing, apparency, delayed closure, autogenous bursts”,etc. While Adam’s paintings often have an immediate impact on the viewer, their greatest strength lies in their power to draw in viewers and keep them visually, mentally, and emotionally engaged over long periods of looking, thinking, and feeling. Her works asks the viewer to give their exclusive attention to observe what happens when a wire-thin line journeys into an undefined field, or when a jolts of color move in a parabolic trajectory across the canvas.