Marina Adams: Cosmic Repair
Timothy Taylor is pleased to present Cosmic Repair, an exhibition of new paintings by Marina Adams, marking the artist’s debut presentation with the gallery in New York. The exhibition features ten large-scale and midsize canvases, each rendered in Adams’s vocabulary of vivid colour and organic form. Through rhythmic compositions that explore pattern, scale, and spatial tension, Adams continues her investigation into the expressive possibilities of abstraction. This presentation follows the announcement of Adams’s representation by the gallery in March 2025.
By turns kinetic and subtle, Adams’s abstractions feature distilled forms gleaned from a wide variety of cultural sources—such as Uzbek textiles, the Great Pyramids, Indigenous American Southwest pottery, and the paintings of Henri Matisse and Hilma af Klint—as well as the natural environment alike. Her compositions often centre on a vertically oriented shape whose power of signification is profoundly encompassing—this form evokes a running stitch or a stretch of river, a voluptuous figure or an arrangement of clouds. Each canvas is at once wholly resolved and, seemingly, an excerpt of a larger pattern, a broader context outside the pictorial frame. In this way her work always refers to the notions of part and whole, interrelationship and interdependence.
Featuring works created in 2024 and 2025 alongside a single painting from 2020, this exhibition offers Adams’s deep reflection on the moment in which she is working—a period defined by the onslaught of humanitarian, environmental, and political crises. Adams channels her experiences of these events into the very substance of her work, painting not in spite of tragedy but as an act of defiance and hope. “People need to remember that they have power,” the artist explains. “We can experience joy without being in denial about what’s going on. It’s about supporting those that are fighting the good fight; giving strength and courage.” The titles of Adams’s paintings lend the texture of ideas to her compositions. She names each work after the painting is completed; often, her titles are inspired not by the resulting image, but by the experience of painting itself.
In Cosmic Repair, several works have titles that serve as remembrances or dedications. Anti-Fascist Flower (for Alice Notley) and the related painting Beauty Is Its Own Excuse for Being (both 2025) share a palette of gauzy peach, ultramarine blue, hazy sky blue, and bolder passages of yellow, orange, or green. The first is an homage to the work and spirit of Notley, the experimental American poet of dreamlike epics, who passed away in May 2025. Each of these compositions seems to reach simultaneously upward and outward. As with so much of Adams’s work, the forms therein might be foreground or background, figure or shadow, the line or what the line encloses. These categorical slips suggest that everything in Adams’s work, and indeed in the world in general, is conditioned by perspective.
In resonant hues of indigo, ochre, and oxblood red, Out of the Ashes (for Palestine) (2024–25) features a central, radiant diamond form that seems to push against the constraints of the canvas. Conjuring a sense of endurance and resilience, the painting also holds ground for grieving.
Offering a kind of punctuation to the exhibition, Singing to the Highest Deity (2020) features an ebullient choreography of magenta, purple, orange, and teal surrounding a vivid red lozenge form. The arrangement of colour sends the eye around the canvas in constant movement, finding a surprising rhythm and emotional resonance within the beautifully irregular shapes.
