NEW YORK

Alice Adams

Sculpture and Drawings 1964-2025

Opening Saturday, May 17th, 2-5 PM
On view through July 18th, 2025.

At Zürcher Gallery, New York

To coincide with “Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams" at The Courtauld, in London, on view June 20 - September 14, 2025.

Featured on artforum.com’s “Must-See Shows” list for New York,

Zürcher Gallery is thrilled to present this third one-woman show of Alice Adams (born 1930, Brooklyn) which features a group of 7 new wood-lath "architectural" sculptures, 2025, as well as a group of recent works on graph paper dealing with woven forms. To put things in perspective, this new body of work is paired with 2 earlier wood-lath columns with arches from the early 70’s, a latex foam rubber “construction” dated 1970, and a large ink on paper work from 1964-1965.

This show coincides with Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams curated by Jo Applin at The Courtauld, in London, on view June 20 - September 14, 2025. 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, and which Irving Sandler claimed ushered in Postminimalism. It included Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Gary Kuehn, Bruce Nauman, Don Potts, Keith Sonnier, and Frank Lincoln Viner. 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.” 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. Two Columns on Graph Paper, is an ink on graph paper work (1964-1965) which survived a fire in her storefront studio in the late 60’s and predates Big Aluminum 1, 1965, shown in Eccentric Abstraction in 1966 as well as Big Aluminum 2 shown in Materializing Six Years, Lucy Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art at the Brooklyn Museum, 2012.

Just like Eva Hesse, Alice was experimenting new materials like wire mesh, latex, foam rubber. 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.

In the 70’s, Adams made larger sculptures that Lucy Lippard referred to as “architectural sculpture;” a telling example is Volume, 1974, made of twobyfours and wood-lath sheathing which was presented by Zürcher Gallery in 2023. This time, we are exhibiting Column with Frame for Two Arches, 1973 and Column with Three Arches Springing, 1974, which are sculptures without a base, vertical configurations that hold their own space which is closer to human experience. They are tall, seven and eight feet high, made of wood lath and twobyfours that flare to one side into the beginnings of an arch and of a ceiling vault, respectively. The innards of the pieces are exposed in the rear, permitting a view of their engineering. Each is, in effect, a fragment of architecture torn from an imaginary building, and each is just complete enough to give a sense of what that building might be like. At the same time, they function with perfect efficiency in abstract sculptural terms. They have a quirky strength, and the pleasure they give, while belonging neither exactly to architecture nor exactly to sculpture participates in both.

In 2024, Alice Adams started making new architectonic structures again, Outside In, 2024, Linlithgo Column Black, Linlithgo Column White, 2025. She also recreated Column with Three One-Half Arches II, after a first version made in 1973 and exhibited in 1974 at 55 Mercer Gallery, a co-op gallery she co-founded in 1970. 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.

It seems that now, Alice Adams will be acknowledged AGAIN for her unique “architectural sculpture” practice she is continuing to develop with great thinking and talent.

A journey well worth making, Peter Schjeldahl in the New York Times, January 20, 1974