Yura Adams
Companion, Olympia Gallery, New York by William Corwin, June 20, 2025
What is it about “significant form” that engrosses and upsets, or even lifts?
From a purely formalist perspective, the ability of abstraction to elicit an emotional response from the viewer has always been a matter of no small contention. What is it about “significant form” that engrosses and upsets, or even lifts? The Theosophists Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater proposed the concept of “Thought-Forms” which found occult and sensual meaning in specific colors and shapes, and was deeply influential on Kandinsky among others. I bring this up as a preamble for the consideration of the work of Yura Adams, whose exhibition of paintings, Companion, is on view through June 21 at Olympia Gallery. Adams’ abstraction seems coded: she uses textures and shapes that trigger vague recognition, but they don’t go far enough so that we can pinpoint an exact object. There are loose concepts floating about like “architecture” or “vegetation,” and it can get even more specific, like “tree,” “cell,” or “woodgrain.” There are also snippets and quotes from other painters; Brice Marden, Paul Klee, Frank Stella, and Edvard Munch, which act as a shorthand argument to bring up the painterly questions and issues with which these artists dealt. The end result of Adams’ process is lively poetic and diagrammatic constructions.
In Moths Fading From Public Eye (2024), a five-noded pink shape reminiscent of a slice through the spinal cord or a marbled cut of sirloin floats on a patchy ochre background. A narrow vertical band forms a border on the canvas to the right. Within the band of darker ochre we have a Marden-like thread of undulating almost script-like squiggles (a form we also see in Cicada Timbale 2024). The two sections of the painting coexist in reasonable harmony: fat versus skinny, blooming versus convolution. The artist is weighing the forms, seeking a balance. Cicada Timbale has a similar format: here the squiggle gets more room on the left, and the bulbous forms have shrunk to a series of pale white lines, no longer solid but now five busy shapes containing meandering lines of their own. The title gives a sense of competing rhythms, but the color and forms seem to reference the frenetic microscopic world of twisting organisms freed from gravity.
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The Dutchess Stump (2025) plays the nesting irregular lines of wood grain or bark texture in a central hallucinogenic blob against a Stella-like series of stripes on the right. The organic lines veer from baby-blue and pink, to yellow and white and gray, to burnt sienna and burnt ochre. While the form resembles wood, we can’t be too sure, except that Adams has placed a dark green and steel gray tree-form within the bottom of the form itself, acting as a determinative, telling us “this is a tree.” Relating the tree to the rectilinear form lurking behind it, we are reminded that there are no straight lines in nature, yet we are nature ourselves, and we make straight lines, so how does that work?
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Following along the lines of that conundrum, Adams has chosen to paint the walls of the gallery in ghostly white on black, implying that the paintings are drawn from a kind of all-over miasma of pattern and form that is an unavoidable source of inspiration to the attuned painter. Housatonic Breezy (2025), again seems to be a dialogue between a larger pale blue form with dark blue-and-pink appendages and an ethereal hybrid squiggle of brown and white. It is the largest painting in the show and has been installed in the front window, where it cohabits nicely with the projected shadows of the tree in front of the gallery and the reflections of life on Orchard Street, seemingly reinforcing the pre-existing nature of these shapes and gestures, and the need to simply look in order to find them everywhere.