TitleDes Clefs
Artist
Pat Adams
(American, b. 1928)
Date1990
MediumMixed media on paper mounted on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 15 1/8 × 20 1/4 in.
Framed: 16 1/2 × 21 1/2 × 2 in.
SubmissionANA diploma presentation, October 14, 1992
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1992.31
Label TextPat Adams has used a complex abstract visual vocabulary to explore metaphysical ideas in her paintings and prints for decades. Growing up Stockton, California, her earliest engagement with art came through stories of women in her family who painted in the nineteenth century and visiting the Haggin Museum, particularly its annual children's exhibition. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving her BA in 1949, and attended summer sessions at the California College of Arts and Crafts (renamed the California College of the Arts), the University of the Pacific, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Most influential among her instructors at Berkeley were Margaret Peterson for her ideas on color and Worth Ryder, whose teachings prepared her to "think, to understand the terms through which one arrives at form rather than to proceed through emulating style." Adams came to New York in 1950 to continue her studies at the Brooklyn Museum Art School with instructors Max Beckmann, John Ferren, and Reuben Tam, NA. Interaction with the collections and exhibitions in New York expanded her visual literacy tremendously. The following year she traveled to Europe where she was profoundly affected by encounters with such diverse works as fifteenth-century panel paintings by Hieronymous Bosch, illuminations within the Lindisfarne Gospels, Turner's nearly abstract late works, and Chinese landscape paintings from the Song dynasty. These influences were manifested in paintings shown in her first solo exhibition, held at the Korman Gallery (soon to become Zabriskie Gallery) in 1954. A Fulbright fellowship to study in France in 1956 enabled the artist to examine the prehistoric megaliths along the coast of Brittany. Her encounter with the Gavrinis Tumulus was particularly instrumental in addressing her interest in the genesis of visual thought at that time.
"Des Clefs" incorporates various linear qualities combined with the textural encrustation of mixed media that the artist introduced to her work beginning in the 1970s. Adams is very much interested in the components of perception and how these shape our apprehension of reality. Through her use of calculated and random items, the artist reaches into a realm of elemental interactions on both a micro- and macrocosmic scale, which yields a range of associations to natural phenomena. Adams has cited a particular interest in the notion of an "inner space" as defined by the French nineteenth-century physiologist Claude Bernard "as the equilibrium achieved to establish and necessary to maintain the entity of each species." In resisting easy outside references, her works are visual propositions in which the tension of ideas of universality and specificity, outward expansion and inward exploration, achieve, in the words of Martica Sawin, "something akin to alchemical transformation, that is, an effect of process, of on-going becoming that illuminates the condition in which we exist."
MNP
