Yura Adams - Companion

Yura Adams. Companion Installation View. 2025. Photo courtesy of Olympia 

By CLARE GEMIMA 

At Olympia, Companion reveals Yura Adams’s ongoing inquiry into impermanence, solitude, and the reciprocal tempo between painter and environment. On view through June 21, 2025, the exhibition brings together oil paintings that privilege abstraction over representation, each one distilling a charged negotiation between gesture and perception. Informed by Adams’s daily immersion in the rural landscapes of Western Massachusetts, the works do not depict nature so much as move with it, tracking its rhythms, divergences, and shifts in parallel motion.

Her compositions echo the temporal rhythms of natural systems—germination, bloom, decay, disintegration—yet resist the conventions of ecological portraiture. They open onto a mutable field where figuration disperses, and the singular subject dissolves into ambient gesture. Brushwork approaches recognition, then retreats, holding a suspended tension between emergence and disappearance. “I don’t want to nail down the subject, so I abstract the forms,” she told artist Daniel Giordano in a recent conversation about the exhibition.

Moths Fading From Public Eye, 2024. Oil on linen. 60 x 48 x 1. Photo courtesy of Olympia 

Companion centers around five major paintings, each asserting a distinct presence while drawing from a shared formal language. Nesting Box Transition presents an eruption of dandelion-like bursts in sky blue and moss green—floating, scattering, recomposing. Scent of Milkweed Blossom Drives Monarch Traffic compresses the surface with petal-heavy gestures, as if summoned through breath or recollection. In Moths Fading From Public Eye, a lone hibiscus rendered in soft grapefruit tones stands in for what fades from shared awareness. The tree form in The Dutchess Stump reads as both anchor and residue—part structure, part afterimage, and in jagged motion and frozen spikes, Cicada Timbale hums with a kind of percussive charge that seems to entirely evade any sense of plant recognition. 

Adams forgoes the convention of presenting discrete works within a neutral white cube, instead reconfiguring Olympia as a stage-like environment attuned to the choreographic logic of her practice, one rooted in performance and photography since the 1970s. Modest in scale yet dense with gesture, the paintings are theatrically lit, each isolated by spotlights that heighten their strong smudgings and strokes. Encasing the gallery is a wallpaper mural backdrop—a monochromatic collage of motifs lifted directly from the paintings, composed in Photoshop and printed at scale. From afar, it suggests a painted field, but upon closer inspection reveals its digital construction. This oscillation between surface and source is signature in Adams’s process in which compositions originate as speculative digital studies. These iterations, never prescriptive, serve as loose frameworks—open to fragmentation, recombination, or abandonment as her paintings take shape on canvas.

Cicada Timbale, 2024. Oil on linen. 60 x 48 x 1. Photo courtesy of Olympia

This logic of transformation also finds pointed expression in Housatonic Breezy, a diptych installed in the gallery’s front window, anchored in Adams’s direct relationship to place. The Housatonic River, which borders her property, remains ecologically compromised—contaminated by General Electric’s PCB dumping, unfishable, yet insistently alive. Adams renders this entanglement without sentiment or lament. Her landscape paintings (only in the loosest sense) eschew nostalgia in favor of an unresolved tension: a poetics of endurance shaped by contamination, where beauty and collapse remain inseparable.

The exhibition’s title emerged through early conversations between Adams and Olympia’s director, Ali, as the word “companion” repeatedly surfaced in their studio exchanges. It offered an intuitive framework for the works' quiet gravitational pull. Living and working in rural solitude, Adams has developed a sustained attentiveness to the trees, plants, and non-human presences that inhabit her surroundings. Many of the trees on her property have died of natural causes, leaving behind stumps that recur throughout her paintings. These forms are not mourned; they are regarded with care, acknowledged not as remnants but as enduring participants, and friends. 

The Dutchess Stump, 2025. Oil on linen. 60 x 48 x 1. Photo courtesy of Olympia 

The exhibition reflects on what companionship might entail when the human is no longer central. It considers how we relate to what endures beyond us, to what persists quietly at the edges of perception, regardless of whether we choose to notice. These questions gain particular urgency in the context of environmental demise, though Adams resists making them explicit. Her approach, while touched by a sense of care, remains measured and seemingly nuetral. 

Companion is not an exhibition of grand gestures. Its strength lies in its restraint, in the way it asks viewers to slow down, recalibrate, and attune to a different register. These paintings do not clamor for attention, but softly hold it. Adams’s painterly language is recursive, with stumps, branches, seed pods, and blossoms reappearing across canvases in altered states. The resulting works have arisen abstractly: not as representational, but as sustained acts of perception. In this light, companionship shifts from sentiment to duration, becoming a quiet, ongoing practice of noticing what once was, and documenting what still remains.