Marina Adams

Marina Adams is an American abstract painter, born in Orange, New Jersey. She earned a BFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia and an MFA from Columbia University in New York. She lives and works between Bridgehampton, New York City, and the hills outside Parma, Italy.Adams is known for her vibrant, large-scale abstract paintings in which color, movement, pattern and form become the primary means of expression. Her compositions are characterised by fluid, interlocking shapes, sweeping curves and fields of saturated color that create a strong sense of rhythm across the surface. While firmly abstract, her paintings often suggest associations with the human body, landscape, textiles and architectural forms.Color occupies a central role in Adams's practice. Rather than treating painting as a purely optical experience, she approaches abstraction as a way of communicating temperament, emotion, intellect and sensation. Her visual language draws inspiration from a wide range of sources, including the natural world, music, poetry, architecture and textiles. Moroccan rugs, Moorish mosaics and decorative traditions have been particularly influential, alongside artists such as Henri Matisse, Joan Mitchell, Alma Thomas, Willem de Kooning and Hilma af Klint. Pattern, for Adams, functions as a visual language capable of crossing cultural and historical boundaries.Alongside her paintings on linen, Adams maintains an extensive practice on paper incorporating drawing, gouache, printmaking and collage. Drawing plays an important role in developing new forms and patterns, allowing greater spontaneity and improvisation to enter her compositions. She has also collaborated with poets including Norma Cole, Charles Bernstein, Vincent Katz, Leslie Scalapino and Christian Prigent, reflecting the close relationship between visual language and poetry within her wider artistic practice.Adams has exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally. Major solo presentations include FOCUS: Marina Adams at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2020, Wild Is Its Own Way at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, in 2021, What Are You Listening To? in New York in 2022, In the Garden of My Memory at Longlati Foundation, Shanghai, in 2023, To a World Full of Others at von Bartha, Basel, in 2024, and Cosmic Repair at Timothy Taylor, New York, in 2025. A survey dedicated to her works on paper from 1994–2025 was presented at Peter Blum Gallery in New York in 2026.Adams received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2016 and the Award of Merit Medal for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. Her work is represented in major institutional collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Colby College Museum of Art; Longlati Foundation, Shanghai; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; and the Rennie Collection, Vancouver.Through her distinctive combination of bold color, flowing forms and rhythmic structure, Adams has developed an immediately recognisable approach to contemporary abstraction, exploring painting as a physical, emotional and intellectual experience.