JUNE 2023
Dreaming of Eden - Timothy Taylor Gallery, New York, NY
Alicia Adamerovich · Louise Bourgeois · Francesca DiMattio · Tracey Emin · Emma Fineman · Jenna Gribbon · Natalia González Martín · Karyn Lyons · Malù dalla Piccola · Hayal Pozanti · Antonia Showering · Kiki Smith · Penny Slinger · Katy Stubbs.
Au-delà - Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, FR
FEBRUARY 2023
Curated by Agnes Gryczkowska
Alicia Adamerovich · Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvojic · Ivana Bašić · Hildegard von Bingen · Bianca Bondi · Romeo Castellucci · Matthew Angelo Harrison · Eva Hesse · Janina Kraupe-Świderska · Wifredo Lam · Michèle Lamy · Tau Lewis · Kat Lyons · Kali Malone · Ana Mendieta · Christelle Oyiri · Tobias Spichtig · TARWUK · Jeanne Vicerial · Anna Zemánková. As well as Cycladic idols and a Punic stele.
While the world becomes increasingly wounded and desecrated and people seem more detached from the magic and power of the earth, the desire to invent and reinvent rituals and languages which would enable us to reach the sacred can be seen as a reaction to the degradation of the living, a counterculture responding to the general profanity of life. The subject of ritual—what makes us chant and dance, laugh and cry, dwell and transcend—tells a part of the history of our humanity while also outlining the one we hope to invent.
Unfolding like a choreographed rite itself through new, as well as rarely exhibited historical, modern, and contemporary works from the fields of art, music, fashion, and theatre, Au-delà takes us into a world in constant transformation, pulling us “beyond”, deeper into ourselves and through the layers of time in order to reinforce our presence in the now.
This is the time of the hour - Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
FEBRUARY 2023
Kohn Gallery is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based artist Alicia Adamerovich. This will be Adamerovich’s inaugural show with the gallery, and will be on view concurrently with Frieze Los Angeles. In This is the time of the hour, Adamerovich studies themes of overwhelm through introspective alien landscapes and wood sculptures that traverse the subconscious, inviting her audience to visualize their own psychological state.
The landscapes – seemingly barren with their darkened color palette and unsettling, organic surfaces of pumice, wax, and sand – come gracefully alive with radiant orbs and spiraling, structured appendages. Works like Blessed be thy cavity communicate the duality of seen and unseen, or as Adamerovich writes, “connections between emotion and the dichotomy of familiarity and alienation.”
Stylistically, the protruding and recessing contours carry over to sculpture as seen in Blaring in a vacuum. Adamerovich’s overlapping painting and sculptural practices harkens back to Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim who integrated natural materials across her body of work. These amorphous shapes are anthropomorphic and seductive in nature with soft curvatures alternately drawn from the realms of the arboreal, anatomical, and fantastical.
The physicality of Adamerovich’s process allows for an interplay between interpretations of negative space and interior illuminations. Beyond self-reflection, other references guiding This is the time of the hour are the forests of her hometown in western Pennsylvania, creatures in an 80s sci-fi feature, and ancient artifacts. The natural quality of the recycled wood is revived in futuristic forms, manipulated into uncanny, horn-like structures. Analogous to a hellmouth, the abstracted collapsing rings echo Frank Stella’s phantasmagoric experimentations, as well as remnants of the Mono-ha movement.
“These forms represent thoughts and feelings,” Adamerovich explains. “I’m not trying to remake anything from our physical world; everything I’m making is psychological.”
Adamerovich’s work recalls the dreamlike renderings of Agnes Pelton, and Georgia O'Keefe's color sensibility. The voyeuristic portals found in her work articulated through surreal tenebrosity allow a glimpse into something strangely intimate and private, though welcoming of individual interpretation: “Although the experiences I’m able to create are personal, I think the ‘hard-to-place-ness” of being alive is universal in its absolute ridicule. Absurdity is a deeply familiar sensation and it runs deep throughout. It has everything to do with living in today's world.”
To be a giant and keep Quiet about it - Margot Samel Gallery, NYC
JULY 2022
Curated by Margot Samel
Alicia Adamerovich · Miguel Cardenas · Andrew Cranston · Justin Fitzpatrick · Elizabeth Glaessner · Merlin James · Olivia Jia · August Krogan-Roley · Ella Kruglyanskaya · Sarah Lee · Daisy Sheff · Nicolas Party · Stephen Polatch · Kathy Ruttenberg · Andrew Sim · Autumn Wallace · Areum Yang
Ultra-gentle manipulation of delicate structures - Pangée, Montréal, QC
JUNE 2022
Alicia Adamerovich explores the tensions between strength and fragility, industry and nature, static and breathing. She abstracts feelings in order to produce forms at the cross section of organic and illusory. Elements of science fiction and alienation encroach upon Adamerovich’s practice, ultimately mediated by her desires for connection and provocation. Having spent her adolescence mired in feelings of isolation and brushes with the natural world, she’s taken to exploring her own crafted environments. She plumbs her own psychological depths, weaving internal fabrics into rich biomorphic vistas.
The paintings for this exhibition are darker, as if they’re slowly moving into the shadows. Vestiges of familiarity persist alongside ambiguous formations. Here she explores structures and the scaffolding of form. Her constructions become fragile protectors of darkness or negative space. They fall just short of tangibility and make the case for imagined futures or mythologized histories. She challenges perception, blocking viewers from complete understanding without rejecting the desire to behold. Her works are catalysts for the imagination, vessels for seeking.
The paintings are conceived in four to five layers, initially entered through “maybes” and projected desires. Colors develop with each layer and many changes occur in service of getting the lighting just right. Throughout this process, each composition morphs into a specific “mood.” She injects a granular element by introducing pumice and sand into the mix. Surfaces are built up, encoding time and producing a dimensional element. The sculptures reciprocate this gesture. Adamerovich’s emphasis on her surfaces lures the two mediums closer together; she paints on sculptures, and sculpts her paintings.
Painting is initiated first out of a concern for dry time. The woodworks follow suit and a game of tag ensues: each medium trades off informing and guiding the other. Linework spurs the sculptures into being, then they evolve by way of stacking and building. Adamerovich observes the parallel between these works and the process of drawing, though underscores the distinction between two versus three dimensions. Her sculptures largely emerge from a puzzle-like process through which the final form is gradually revealed.
Pastel works are the newest addition to Adamerovich’s multimedia practice. This process has become a new way for her to make a drawing in layers. Much like the paintings, this material can be built up to a desirable result. She emphasizes the vitality of illustration in each medium as it provides direct access to the imagination and makes space for an arbitration of ideas.
Adamerovich maintains flow within her practice, satiating her own appetite for discovery. Agnes Pelton’s symbolism comes to mind when viewing these works as she, too, offered her own projection of quixotic structures and fantastical landscapes. Elsewhere, Kay Sage’s surrealism comes in contact with the structural considerations of Lee Bontecou and Herbert Ferber. Her titles are not necessarily revelatory, though she lodges grains of meaning within them. They become points of access, calculated lenses through which the viewer may inspect the works. Opportunities for perception and interpretation are thus broached again via language, providing one with yet another access point into Adamerovich’s machinated world.
Text by Reilly Davidson
Second Nature - Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles, 2021
SEPTEMBER 2021
A Bat out of Hell - Sans Titre (2016), Paris FR
JUNE 2021
Inspired by the artistic trend of Biomorphism, Alicia Adamerovich’s practice studies the anthropomorphic nature of objects, sensations, and emotions, and highlights their creative potential. Her work takes form from her unconscious, from her interior thoughts and her psychic evolution. The artist divides her body of work into two distinct entities: “diurnal thoughts” and “nocturnal thoughts.” For ‘A Bat Out of Hell’ at Sans titre (2016), the artist concentrated on the latter, that ones that appear when night falls and bats awaken. The figure of the bat - the only mammal in the world able to fly, which moves about only at night in a quick, lively, staccato manner - is omnipresent in the artist’s work. When it perceives a ray of light or when it encounters a conflict, the animal instinctively puts up its spurs to defend itself and injure the individual in front of it. In her work, Alicia Adamerovich depicts this precise moment when anguish surges in half-sleep. She develops forms both organic and animal. Some reveal a malign character; they seem to escape the frames and envelop us.
The artist’s graphite drawings and paintings represent a bridge between the real world and a fictional space. They’re intentionally produced in a portrait format, personifying the compositions. They express varied sentiments, such as fear, anguish, and perplexity. In the manner of her predecessors, like the couple Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy, who painted dream landscapes and underwater scenes populated with strange biomorphic forms, Alicia Adamerovich, in her works on paper, illustrates a certain tension within a phantasmagorical architecture situated within an infinite horizon. She creates a balance of power between these hybrid organisms stacked upon each other or surging to the front of the pictorial composition. They act as a projection of the US political situation in recent months; the artist retains a bitter memory thereof.
The handmade frames are for Alicia Adamerovich a way of leaving paper behind and exceeding drawing’s limitations in dimension. They reinforce the pictorial composition of the subject and play with hierarchies by conferring upon them the status of icons.
The furniture-sculptures that the artist conceived for the exhibition space were produced from bits of recycled wood, cut, sanded and dyed by her hands. The choice to use natural wood and the importance of demonstrating an artisanal craft are at the heart of the sculptor’s engagement. She confesses to having been fascinated as a youth by a neighbor in her village in Pennsylvania who had built all the furniture in his house by hand. The artist means to propose an alternative to industrial production. The link with Art Nouveau, a movement that arose in reaction to the massive industrialization of the end of the 19th century, is evident; Alicia Adamerovich also takes up its formal codes. The rounded curves of the furniture allow her to extend the limits of the physicality of the object into the surrounding space. They seem to become animate, like chimerical figures, and are at once functional, yet paradoxically endowed with a certain fragility.
The Symbolists, Les Fleurs du mal - Hesse Flatow, NYC
APRIL 2021
Co-curated by Nicole Kaack and Karen Hesse Flatow
Alicia Adamerovich · Joseph Buckley · Maho Donowaki · Hilary Doyle · Clark Filio · Caroline Garcia · Eliot Greenwald, Exene Karros · Nat Meade · Tammy Nguyen · Louis Osmosis · Georgica Pettus · Johanna Robinson · Sistership TV · Alicia Smith · Astrid Terrazas
