Alicia Adamerovich: This is the time of the hour

Kohn Gallery is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based artist Alicia Adamerovich. This will be Adamerovich’s inaugural show with the gallery, and will be on view concurrently with Frieze Los Angeles. In This is the time of the hour, Adamerovich studies themes of overwhelm through introspective alien landscapes and wood sculptures that traverse the subconscious, inviting her audience to visualize their own psychological state.

The landscapes—seemingly barren with their darkened color palette and unsettling, organic surfaces of pumice, wax, and sand—come gracefully alive with radiant orbs and spiraling, structured appendages. Works like Blessed be thy cavity communicate the duality of seen and unseen, or as Adamerovich writes, “connections between emotion and the dichotomy of familiarity and alienation.”

Stylistically, the protruding and recessing contours carry over to sculpture as seen in Blaring in a vacuum. Adamerovich’s overlapping painting and sculptural practices harkens back to Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim who integrated natural materials across her body of work. These amorphous shapes are anthropomorphic and seductive in nature with soft curvatures alternately drawn from the realms of the arboreal, anatomical, and fantastical.  

The physicality of Adamerovich’s process allows for an interplay between interpretations of negative space and interior illuminations. Beyond self-reflection, other references guiding This is the time of the hour are the forests of her hometown in western Pennsylvania, creatures in an 80s sci-fi feature, and ancient artifacts. The natural quality of the recycled wood is revived in futuristic forms, manipulated into uncanny, horn-like structures. Analogous to a hellmouth, the abstracted collapsing rings echo Frank Stella’s phantasmagoric experimentations, as well as remnants of the Mono-ha movement.