Current
Upcoming
Past

Peter Gallo’s ad hoc, emotional works are rooted in the body and its material fragility and incorporate references to Catholic mysticism, art history, pop songs, and literature, often featuring poetic text applied to various substrates–a cabinet door or an old book, for example–by pushing paint through a hypodermic needle. Gallo’s painterly assemblages contain a multiplicity of time: they feel both new and old, made with well-worn materials that bear the marks of their own histories; quick and slow; slapdash and carefully assembled. The exhibition will feature works made over the past decade such as Possession, 2023-2025, which bears the reproduction of Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa collaged across found cabinet doors and Violets Violets Violets (E. Dickinson), 2016-2025, which echoes the imagery from Dickinson’s famous poem, to emphasize the fleeting nature of existence. The title of the exhibition, Gods, Sluts & Martyrs, embeds a reading of Gallo’s work in terms of religious frameworks, power dynamics and sexual norms and conventions.

Joan Nelson is known for her subversive exploration of landscape painting rooted in an engagement with feminism, spiritualism, science fiction, and environmentalism since the 1980s. New Mountains, an exhibition of works by Nelson presented in collaboration with Chapter NY, is the artist’s first solo show in New York in nearly 25 years. On view will be new paintings alongside a selection of Nelson’s intricate miniatures from 2013-14.

On a very quiet morning, on the same piece of toast features new works by Japanese artists Noriko Kawana, Hikari Ono, and Nao Kikuchi. Curated by artist Kenji Ide, the exhibition brings together works that are concerned with intimate moments of human action and connection—their preludes, influences, and manifested consequences—especially in relation to the body, and more specifically, hands. Hikari Ono's intimate clay works suggest touch and interaction, incorporating reference to movement and materials from the natural world to explore themes of care, expression, and precision of intention, while Nao Kikuchi's small scale ceramic works wrap industrial abstractions in nostalgia and playful articulations of geometric forms. Noriko Kawana's delicate and meticulous sculptures combine simple forms such as lines, rectangles, and circles, into complex arrangements that reference pattern, systems, language, and human built tools of measurement and calculation. Broad themes of time and the body, agency and influence, and the subtle interplay of proximity and perception offer an investigation of human interrelationships to one another, the objects and materials of the world, and our own past, present, and future, that guide and shape us as we shape them in turn.

In May, Adams and Ollman is pleased to present a solo exhibition with Antonia Kuo, the artist's first on the West Coast. For the exhibition, Kuo has created new two- and three-dimensional works that explore the potential of the photographic medium both to record and to create an image. Inherent in the works is an exploration of how to capture light, time and the artistic process in the studio. Working with light-sensitive paper and photochemistry, Kuo creates layers of imagery that are informed by objects in the world such as industrial materials and machine parts, trace gestures of her body and chance. The resulting work offers the viewer a glimpse into an interpretative field of entropic energies and phenomena.