Zürcher Gallery is thrilled to open this second one-woman show of Alice Adams (b. 1930) which features a group of 3 large sculptures from the late 70’s which were shown at MoMA and Sculpture Center in NY, as well as Adams’s House etchings from the same time period.
Alice Adams may be 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. Yet in the early 60’s, Adams was working as a sculptor in the City. In 1966, Lucy Lippard showed Alice Adams’s 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. In the 70’s, Alice Adams made larger sculptures that Lucy Lippard referred as “architectural sculpture”. They involved construction methods like joinery and led her to think on place projecting them to a larger scale of site-specific installations until she developed her first permanent public project in 1984. By 1973, the carpentry and lathing were separated from the walls and absorbed into free-standing boxes and then into columns sprouting chunky nascent arches. Remembering the arches she had seen in Romanesque churches in France, Alice Adams removes them from their both logical materials and contexts in order to reestablish them as sculptural entities.