NEW YORK

Alice Adams

Works from 1964 to 2023

March 18 - May 12

At Zürcher Gallery, New York

A catalogue is available for $30.00 (cash only). The digital edition can be viewed here.

Zürcher Gallery is thrilled to rediscover the work of Alice Adams (born 1930, Brooklyn) who has not been shown in a New York art gallery since 1981. Alice Adams is best-known for her site-specific land art installations and public projects she made in the 80’s and 90’s for airports, university campuses and transit systems in the United States. And yet in the early 60’s Adams was working as a sculptor in the City. In 1965, she moved her studio to a former laundry storefront on East 92nd street in New York – which burnt in a fire in 1968 -- so she relocated to 246 Bowery. In 1966 Lucy Lippard showed Alice Adams’ Big Aluminum 1 in Eccentric Abstraction, at the Fischbach Gallery, NY, a show since considered a watershed moment in the history of advanced abstract sculpture. It included Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Gary Kuehn, Bruce Nauman, Don Potts, Keith Sonnier, and Frank Lincoln Viner. Big Aluminum 1 was hung above Rope and Cable Structure and Red Fluorescent Structure, two smaller squat objects from 1964 which sat on the floor. In 1968, Alice repurposed some of her earlier aluminum sculptures. She entwined Fluorescent Structure with the smaller shape woven from aluminum wire comprising Big Aluminum 1 so that they became entangled into a new deliberate form titled 22 Tangle (1968). Lucy Lippard comments : “ Alice Adams was an accomplished weaver for many years; when she turned to sculpture, she acquired no sacred sense of medium, and was free to invent. Her familiarity with flexible, manipulable materials led her to work with forms that are patently man-made, but have a strangeness operating close to a natural level. The gawky, semi-architectural armatures of chicken wire, industrial cable and link-fencing retain traces of biomorphism, though not so much as her older work, which evoked unnamed creatures – ropy, rough tangles of fiber and painted cable.”

The machined materials (sheet metal and metal lath) Adams was using by the mid-60’s may echo Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin’s works shown in ¨Primary Structures : Younger American and British Sculptors curated by Kynaston McShine at the Jewish Museum (1966) but to a point because Adams just like the other artists who exhibited in Lucy Lippard’s 1966 Eccentric Abstraction, was more interested in striking a tension between handicraft and fabricated forms. In 1967 she made a first series of “corners”, cast of polyester resin mixed with white paint, leaning against the wall. They were not direct casts but referenced the corners of rooms. Then she made a different series, she mounted on an existing corner of a room a silicone rubber piece called silastic to double the corner and make it part of the architecture. Walls and spaces of a room became a new focus. Adams wanted to use lath and plaster as they were meant to be used “ to create a plaster wall surface” (1). She built a wall-like structure attached to squares of purchased vinyl flooring in order to make for scale and called it Wall and Floor (1967). It’s not an architectural artifact from a demolished building in Gordon Matta-Clark’s sense but an independent sculpture that shows the juncture point of wall and floor and reveals what existed beneath the surface.

In 1969 when she relocated to the Bowery, she began to directly cast her studio walls. “The wall is a non-subject", Adams explained in 1972. “When you come into a room, you expect to see a wall. The way my works are put together is obvious, so you are forced to compare them to the real walls …It’s a way of making sculpture.” (2). Adams painted a portion of wall with 8 layers of liquid latex mixed with white paint, peeling off a flexible fabric reproducing the traces of the original wall and giving it like a second life.  She made several cast walls, one of them Leaning Wall, 1970 was exhibited at the 1971 Whitney Annual, sections of latex paint and lath mounted on supports which were leaning on the wall.  In the current show, we are showing Bowery Wall, 1970, the cast of a plaster wall of Adams’s studio on the second floor of 246 Bowery. In the 70’s, Adams made larger sculptures that Lucy Lippard referred as “architectural sculpture”,a telling example is Volume, 1974, made of 2x4’s and wood-lath sheathing. The 70’s was a decade when Adams’s work grew in scale and involved construction methods like joinery and led her to develop her reflections on place projecting them to a larger scale of site-specific installations until she developed her first permanent public project in 1984.

Alice Adam’s work has been included in significant group-exhibitions :

-        Eccentric Abstraction, Fischbach gallery, NY
(September 20 – October 8, 1966)
-        Sculpture Annual, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC (1971)
-        Penthouse Gallery, Museum of Modern Art, NYC (1971)
-        Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC (1973)
-        Architectural References, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, CA (1980)
-        An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC (1984)
-        Decoys, Complexes and Triggers, Feminism and Land-Art in the 1970’s at the Sculpture Center, NY
(May 4 – July 28, 2008)
-        Materializing Six Years : Lucy Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art,
Brooklyn Museum ( September 14, 2012- February 3, 2013) curated by Catherine Morris
-        Making Knowing : Craft in Art (1950-2019), Whitney Museum of Art
(November 22, 2019- February 1, 2022)

 (1) Alice Adams, email exchange with Kirsten Swenson, May 25, 2018
(2) Lucy Lippard, 1974