Alicia Adamerovich

“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Eye is the First Circle, Lee Krasner’s epic 1960 painting and an eponymous documentary on women abstract impressionists from the mid 20th century, borrows from an essay called Circles, written in 1841 by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In that text, Emerson rethinks philosophical assumptions about space and perception, arguing for the capacity of personal vision to expand the world, literally and metaphorically, by situating perception as a driving force in an endless, fluid universe in constant becoming. Krasner demonstrated that, as with many women working in abstraction and gestural painting, her methods and conceptual approach embraced this sense of vision as a new way to remake the world around her.

In the exhibition Circles, organized by Pangée, works from the 1930s and 40s by Remedios Varo sketch out some of the real and imaginary spaces that held the social imagination of the era. Varo’s intellectual practice of rendering phenomenological space often incorporates non-physical presence overlapping with space elements that can’t seem to settle. The surrealist horizon can be ambiguous, an exaggerated stage made unsteady by ghost actors who seem to float in and out of frame. But in the European context of emerging modernity — a condition where post-renaissance thought was made whole, confirmed by the whirl of technology and humanist perspective — it represented an emergence into a new kind of world. One of these archival works, Gruta màgica IV (1942), is made in collaboration with the surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, whose poem, Virgule, où vas-tu? (Comma, where are you going?) is penned by Péret himself below Varo’s drawing.

The poem was first published in 1936. Conceived in the foreshadowing of the Second World War, it emerges in the midst of a felt loss of stable, invisible infrastructures. In Varo’s accompanying sketch, a loosely anchored architectural space undergoes existential rupture. The fabric of reality tears throughout, forming gaping vortexes, as a geometric line crawls through. Eight decades later, Angela Heisch’s soft surreal compositions (for example The Search, 2024) seem to draw from the same place. Here, moody, jewel-like raptures morph into glowing nodes, spaces of possibility and depth, smooth, celestial caves hosting black holes where stellar objects refract into endless sources of light. The Valves (2025) draw further inward into an abstracted dream space that is as still as it is encompassing: the inner landscape.

Throughout the genesis of contemporary living, women artists — who, like Varo, chose to take up surrealism or abstraction — had to overcome existential challenges, one of which is a lack of precedent. Essentially, they had to invent their own visual language, containing a world inside of it. While the exterior world has its physical and social limitations and restrictions, its interiority becomes an endless, sprawling, verging space. Turned outward, it exposes the interdependence of hegemonic relations and plots endless new horizons. In Marcelle Ferron’s La souffrance, l'Éros et la Joie (1947), a spinescient phantom created by brushstrokes closes in on something intangible, muddled and unreal, a noisy fever dream, a self-manifesting sort of creature, created and sustained by brushstrokes. It mirrors the biomorphic entities in Alicia Adamerovich’s Touch-me-not (2025) and Plucked from the Deluge (2026), where an underwater-like setting hosts an organic clusters of shapes that likewise seem to emerge, almost growing from the surface. The setting reveals them in a moment of diffused flashing light, appearing both three-dimensional and somehow receded. Grainy, dreamy darkness around the forms gestures to the night and its interior, slippery nature. Frances Williams’s gestural paintings too seem to hint at a figure sheltering among the alternating shadows and flames — revealing by concealing something that wants to emerge, just underneath the surface.

Jilaine Jones is a sculptor whose physical works embody a sense of material emerging in the space by pooling in its imperceptible gaps and cracks. Jones — who in 2018 created a series of freestanding clay works entitled Horizons — here anchors sloping masses of plaster in the grid-like rebar scaffold that supports it (Internal Walk, 2008). In interviews she speaks of “fields,” not in reference to the visual plane that meets the eye, but the interior spaces where her work generates. The physicality of her sculptures too seems to reveal something about the space around it: its as if the invisible infrastructures around which one must exist, a rigid, crumbling web, is making itself known in a flash of realization: “a single instant projected against the screen of eternity.” A similar impulse runs through the early flat works of Mia Westerlund Roosen, an artist who was later known for her massive biomorphic sculptures. Like Varo, Westerlund confronts the flat surface, carving out existential depth. Her oil pastel works trace a barely perceptible sense of non-linear space-time-mutiny: the scratched up surfaces of One (1977) appear as if the artist tried to claw their way into, or out of, the frame, exposing the canvas’s interior.

Running through Circles is the consistent proposition: that the world is not exhausted by what it presents to perception, and that its governing forces, whether ideological, infrastructural, psychological, or historical, register obliquely rather than directly, a method for giving shape to what ordinarily remains intangible, made visible through abstracted biomorphic, geometric and surreal vocabularies. Fresh horizons appear throughout the work of Rita Letendre. Her sensitive and immersive colour fields are often pierced by a single line recalling the steady flash of road lines on highway, a moment of sharp being that brings together a dynamic of light and speed. A modern landscape animated through her own gaze: no longer a figure, but an eye at the centre of the storm, she forms the horizon. In Letendre’s landscapes, for example Reflection on a Winter Night (1983), colours settle tentatively, evoking the fog at dawn. The silent fire of sunrise colours Sans Titre (N.D) defining an emerging horizon. Françoise Sullivan’s tempered acrylic canvases evoke that same sense of an expansive interior: hard surfaces sit closely together, in the fiery Rouges (2011), the space between them feel simultaneously tense and tender, as if they are about to merge.

Nan Montgomery’s geometric compositions, circles, squares and triangles come to delineate mapped meaning, yet the same dynamic sense of motion prevails. Animated lines run across Trilogy I, (2019) like snapshots, traces of the artist in conceptual, two-dimensional space. Somehow, in there, Montgomery finds a way to introduce more depth. There is a sense of being in that space with her — the newly charted world extending itself beyond the boundaries of the image. Likewise, in a large canvas brushed with iridescent turquoise, yellow and cyan, Élise Lafontaine’s Ogive (2026) first evokes a natural structure, branching out like the prismatic light of a chandelier, soon morphing into the memory of a moment, a revelation of sorts. The psychedelic specificity of Lafontaine’s brushwork suggests that the space may extend deeply into the canvas itself if you only keep looking — perhaps the same place that Westerlund Roosen was trying to get to. It is another type of horizon altogether, a space where perspective becomes manifestation, the space of impossibility turned inside out, continuously unfolding.

•  Xenia Benivolski is a writer and curator working with visual and sound art. She contributes regularly to Frieze, e-flux and Texte Zur Kunst. Forthcoming books include On Glass, Metal and Worms (Wolke Press, 2026) and See Through Music (Silver press, 2027).

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

- Søren Kierkegaard

This exhibition marks the first two-person presentation of works by Alicia Adamerovich and Christopher Daharsh, and their first exhibition in Wellington. Married and based in New York, the artists share a daily proximity that quietly informs their practices. Created in close dialogue, the paintings and works on paper gathered here reflect a period of personal and environmental transition. 

Timothy Taylor is pleased to present Rude Awakening, a solo exhibition of new paintings, sculptures, and drawings by Alicia Adamerovich (b. 1989, Latrobe, PA) at the gallery’s New York location. The artist’s debut exhibition in the city and with the gallery, this presentation features enigmatic biomorphic abstractions that reflect on our moment’s uncertain relationship to truth and objective reality. Adamerovich uses paint, pumice, sand, and wood to process absurd or contradictory feelings and thoughts. Sparked by mundane encounters with an intriguing shape, phrase, or angle of light, she works intuitively, generating moody, shadowy landscapes in two and three dimensions.

Raised in western Pennsylvania by her naturalist father and biologist mother, Adamerovich grew up contemplating and drawing the natural world as well as examining its minutiae through a microscope. The organic, geologic, and mathematical forms she observed as a child recur and mutate across her work, reflecting their presence in her subconscious. Shapes that recall protozoa, seedpods, and fractals intermingle in surprising ways.

Over the past two years, she has developed a style of pointillist mark-making that introduces a vivid sense of animation to her compositions, such that the shapes and atmosphere alike appear to be breathing or staticky. The works in Rude Awakening are marked by subdued chaos; Adamerovich has described a sense of precariousness that underlies her recent output, reflecting her distrust of contemporary political and cultural narratives around the climate, human rights, consumerism, and journalistic integrity. The eight paintings presented here heavily feature forms that suggest conveyance—funnels, tubes, capillaries, horns, syphons, sacks, and drops of rain. These shapes inhabit barren stage-like spaces delineated by sharp horizons and invite readings that slip between recognition and alienation. Adamerovich works on her sculptures as she paints, allowing the development of each to inform the other. For some of the sculptures on view at Timothy Taylor, she sourced fallen trees from her parents’s land, chiselling the wood in response to its natural contours. Others are hewn from plywood, which she builds and carves instinctually, as in Surrealist automatism. These works embody the same contrasts the artist reckons with in paint—they are at once geometric and eccentric, meandering and inevitable, uneasy and robust.

New York City, 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

February 15 - May 7, 2023

Paris, France

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.

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.”

New York City, NY

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

Del Vaz Projects is pleased to present Second Nature, a solo exhibition by Alicia Adamerovich. This is the artist’s second presentation with Del Vaz Projects, the first being in October 2020. In her latest compositions resembling nightscapes and tortuous caves, Adamerovich explores the liminal spaces of the body, anchoring the viewer mid-journey within corporeal tunnels.

Adamerovich’s technical practice is rooted in relief – the adding and taking away of value with light and shadow. The artist applies this concept across multiple mediums including drawing, wood carving and painting, collapsing each medium onto the other. Her graphite and pastel drawings, for example, are often framed in hand-carved wooden frames, meant to contain or even mimic her landscapes. Alternatively, her paintings begin as black-gesso foundations upon which Adamerovich essentially carves away, giving rise to organic forms that emerge onto the foreground. Those organic forms then reappear in a cast of carved wooden sculptures resembling domestic furniture.

Paris, FR

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. 

New York City, NY

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