LONDON
Alice Adams
Frieze Masters: Spotlight Section
October 15 - 19, 2025
The Regent’s Park, London
The 2025 edition of Frieze Masters: Spotlight, in London, is a section dedicated to solo artist presentations of work made in the 20th Century, featuring 26 galleries and curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver (Sydney and Frances Lewis Family curator of modern and contemporary art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts).
Alice Adams (b.1930) is best known for her site-specific land art installations and public projects she made in the 80s and 90s for airports, university campuses, and transit systems in the United States. Yet in the early 60s, Adams was working as a sculptor in New York City, combining knowledge from her prior training as a weaver and work in tapestry, the flexibility in these disciplines, with her new interest in architectural elements. Her practice and contributions to "anti-form" abstraction from this period saw little recognition until just recently.
Zürcher Gallery's presentation "Alice Adams: 1964-1979," includes 3 sculptures and 5 works on paper by Adams. This decade marks Adams' relationship to materials sourced from local hardware stores, lumber guards, or salvaged from the streets, as seen in her work "Threaded Grid", made of rusted steel cable and an electrical plate. Alice Adams produced 3 pencil and marker works on graph paper in relation to the forms of "Threaded Grid:" "Strands Thru Grid-Volume," 1964-65, "Grid-Volume," 1964-65, and "Grid Plate Drawing," 1965. This presentation also includes works that speak to Adams' personal relationship to New York City and the spaces she inhabited: "East 92nd Street Loop," 1965, a felt marker work on paper that references the site of her 60s studio on 92nd street in NYC, and "White Corner Cast," 1969, which she produced by casting a corner of a room in silastic resin. In "Latex covered foam construction," 1970, Alice Adams further explores the structural possibilities of weaving, experimenting with grid-based compositions, sculptural and spatial dimensions, tactile qualities of latex and foam rubber. (Alice Adams' "Threaded Grid" and "Resin Corner Pieces" were recently exhibited in "Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Alice Adams" at The Courtauld in London, 20 June - 14 September, 2025.)