Adams and Ollman is pleased to announce one thing and another, a solo exhibition featuring paintings and intimate abstract works on paper by Lynne Woods Turner. The exhibition also includes visual documentation of Trisha Brown’s Spanish Dance as performed at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center in 1979. The exhibition opens with an artist reception on Saturday, January 17, from 3–5pm and remains on view through February 28, 2026.
For more than five decades, Lynne Woods Turner has explored the world through abstraction, developing a unique visual vocabulary drawn from an expansive range of interests. This body of work—encompassing both drawings and paintings across multiple series—is inspired by diverse sources including mathematical investigations, scientific diagrams, graphic cartoons, art history, dance, and sewing patterns. The resulting work is replete with poetic signs and symbols that form a compelling lexicon rooted in both material observation and interior life.
On view in the exhibition will be the artist’s Spanish Dance series, comprised of drawings and paintings that consider the body and its movements through line and space; “magic square” works that visualize the concept of balance within a mathematical problem; and other drawings that explore form and space on a variety of substrates including found paper, folded paper, graph paper, and hand-drawn grids.
Turner has written the following on the work in the exhibition:
My interest in Trisha Brown’s work began with several museum exhibitions of her work in the early 2000s, most memorably It’s a Draw at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia in 2003. I think it is important to note that my initial exposure to her work was to her visual art rather than performance. From the very beginning, I connected with her curiosity about organization and communication—her interest in translating complex three-dimensional ideas into two-dimensional form and vice versa. I admired what I saw as her amalgamation of geometry and visual notation from sources ranging from math and maps to music and textiles. I felt that what she was doing was not specific to a particular genre, but instead explored the comprehension of essential visual and physical relationships. As I became more familiar with Brown’s work, I became fascinated with her ability to fuse form and content with such apparent ease. The vast majority of her work is both approachable and possessed of extreme intellectual and physical rigor. I am impressed by the way her work moved forward in cycles, always building on ideas about balance, sequence, and the interrelationship of parts.
In 2013, I saw a film of Brown’s Spanish Dance from a performance at the Walker. My response was immediate and profound. Here was everything I want from a work of art: smart, articulated, complex but somehow distilled into something essential and whole. The odd but genius juxtaposition of Bob Dylan’s song “Early Morning Rain”, the sensuality and solidarity of the female dancers, the quiet humor of the shadows and the abrupt ending…Perfect!
The drawings I made in response to Spanish Dance came from a place of deep humility. Initially, I was thinking about progression, shifting line, and the counterbalance of curves and angles. Prior to this time, I had treated balance as a compositional problem and most of my references to the body were frontal and symmetric. With these drawings, I gained an understanding of asymmetry as it related to the weight distribution and movement of the human body.
Around this same time, I had also become engaged with magic squares after encountering Albert Durer’s engraving Melancholia. I have always liked math, and even the look of numbers (Jasper Johns), and was for some reason compelled to begin working on investigative drawings based on these mathematical arrangements.
In the beginning, this exploration of magic squares was similar to my fascination with Spanish Dance. I was looking for different ways to explore composition, and studying both the position of the body and the mathematical arrangements of magic squares provided me with access to an asymmetric balance that was also perfect. As different as they might seem, these two groups of work have morphed into a vocabulary of references that contain ideas about shared experience and methods of communicating information visually.
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