Since the mid-1950s, Pat Adams has delved into a fundamental lexicon of abstract geometric shapes, seamlessly woven into undefined expanses of luminous hues, creating works with an intriguing play of contrasts between deep and shallow space, transparency and materiality. With a focus on how we observe, experience, and understand the “multi-sidedness” of the world around us, Adams continues to study the physiological aspects of aesthetics. “Quiet but intense, the gouache paintings by Pat Adams restore to painting a certain delicate, poetic touch that seems to have fallen into desuetude since the late nineteenth century,” wrote Dore Ashton in 1956. At once precise and exploratory, Pat Adams’s oeuvre serves as a manifestation of her unwavering dedication to the realm of visuality and the intricacies of human perception.

Pat Adams (American, b. 1928) was raised in Stockton, California, and began painting at the age of ten. She studied painting at the School of Letters and Sciences at UC Berkeley from 1945–49, where she first encountered the ideas of Hans Hofmann as she studied under his former students - Worth Ryder and Margaret Peterson O’Hagan, and others who had arranged for Hofmann’s migration to the States in 1932, among them. During summers she pursued painting classes at the California College of Arts and Crafts (1945), the College of the Pacific (1946), and the Art Institute of Chicago (1948). In 1950, following her 1949 graduation Phi Beta Kappa from Berkeley, she attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School to study with Max Beckmann, Reuben Tam, and John Ferren. Her first solo exhibition was in 1954 at the Korman Gallery (later to be renamed the Zabriskie Gallery) which would continue to represent her for a period of 56 years through 2010. In 1951 she accompanied her husband, painter and printmaker Vincent Longo on his Fulbright scholarship in Italy, and in 1956, they travelled to France on her Fulbright scholarship.