Yura adams

companion

May 8 — June 21, 2025

Reception: Friday, May 9, 6–8PM

New York City: 41 Orchard Street, Upper Level

Olympia is pleased to announce Companion, an exhibition by performance and visual artist Yura Adams. 

For her second solo show at the gallery, Adams treats the gallery walls as a self-referential network of painterly forms. Her immersive, site-specific environment includes seven oil paintings and a wall installation, extending her marks beyond the confines of the canvas and into the entirety of the space. Companion synthesizes Adams' long-ranging career in performance, sculpture, and two-dimensional surfaces, converging varied sensory languages.

The paintings in Companion introduce a new compositional progression for Adams—shifting the narrative away from individual observations to a more embodied perception of nature and self-exploration, emphasizing the exhibition as a unified whole rather than objects made and exhibited in isolation. Evolving together, this body of work reaches a collective resolution. 

Adams draws extensively from her surroundings in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where nature's phenomenon unfolds just outside her studio door. At the same time, Companion evokes a stream of consciousness that suggests a kinship between the paintings.

In parallel, Adams reflects on the artist’s role in representing the natural world in the midst of ecological crisis. Her wall installation echoes excerpts from the paintings—scaled up, darkened, and rendered in monochrome. These ghostlike forms act as both backdrop and anchor, offering each painting a trusted companion while remaining subject to inevitable transformation.

Yura Adams creates abstract forms inspired by natural phenomena and weather patterns. Observing dynamic interactions within the landscape surrounding her studio, Adams’ translates these sharply articulated impressions into her work. Painting from an industrial building on a farm in Western Massachusetts, Adams' enigmatic visual dialogues arrive through shape, a sense of harmonious inner balance, and a palette rooted in soft grays and vivid, electric hues.

Her recent solo exhibitions include Olympia (New York, NY, 2022–2025), NADA New York (New York, NY, 2022), LABspace (Hillsdale, NY, 2022), and John Davis Gallery (Hudson, NY, 2019). Group exhibitions include Strohl Art Center (Chautauqua, NY, 2025), Vassar College Art Library (Poughkeepsie, NY, 2025), Front Gallery (Houston, TX, 2024), Turley Gallery (Hudson, NY, 2023), Woodstock Art Museum (2021), and Albany Airport (2021).

Adams has received numerous awards, including the Tree of Life Grant (2023), Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant (2022), participation in the Drawing Center Viewing Program (2021), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2019), and fellowships from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation (2017), New York State Council on the Arts (2010), and the New York Foundation for the Arts MARK Program (2009). 

Early in her career, she exhibited in notable New York City venues such as Just Above Midtown, City Gallery, The New Museum, Experimental Intermedia, Franklin Furnace, and FOTO Gallery.

She earned both her BFA (1975) and MFA (1980) from the San Francisco Art Institute.