via: adams
Notes:
Review: Derrick Adams and the Geometry of Representation
Derrick Adams has carved a distinctive place in contemporary art through his innovative use of geometric abstraction to construct representations of Black identity, leisure, and cultural affirmation. His paintings, often composed of modular planes of color and sharply defined forms, transform the language of geometric modernism into a means of portraying human experience. In doing so, Adams bridges two traditions that were once considered opposites—abstraction and figuration—using geometry not as an escape from representation, but as a framework for it.
Geometry as Cultural Structure
Adams’ portraits frequently feature stylized human figures built from rectangular and triangular color fields, recalling the visual syntax of artists such as Piet Mondrian or Paul Klee. Yet, unlike those early modernists, Adams infuses geometry with narrative purpose. His figures are often engaged in everyday acts of self-care or joy—swimming, lounging, or dressing—creating a formal tension between mechanical order and emotional warmth. The grid becomes a metaphor for structure within freedom, echoing both the architectural rhythm of urban environments and the cultural frameworks that shape identity.
Comparative Context: From Mondrian to Jacob Lawrence
Where Mondrian sought universal harmony through strict geometric abstraction, Adams personalizes that system, embedding within it the specificity of Black life. His color palette—often vibrant, saturated, and rhythmic—recalls Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, where geometric simplification also serves representation. Both artists share a concern with structure: Lawrence’s compositions use diagonals and rectangles to choreograph historical movement, while Adams uses similar formal devices to celebrate personal and social balance.
However, while Lawrence’s narrative geometry often directs the viewer’s eye toward collective struggle and progress, Adams shifts focus toward leisure, rest, and interiority—domains historically denied to Black subjects in art. In this way, Adams updates Lawrence’s modernist vocabulary for a new politics of representation.
Contrast with Contemporary Geometric Realism
Comparing Adams to contemporary painters like Odili Donald Odita and Njideka Akunyili Crosby reveals further nuances. Odita’s abstract color systems engage geometry as a language of diaspora and cultural intersection, while Crosby merges photorealism with collage and pattern to construct domestic and psychological space. Adams stands between these two poles: his work remains abstracted yet insistently representational. The face, body, and posture emerge from color planes without dissolving into pure form—suggesting that geometry itself can bear human presence.
Conclusion
Derrick Adams reinvents geometric abstraction as a humanist practice. Through his formal discipline, he makes visible the architecture of selfhood—how we build, mask, and reveal our identities within cultural systems. In dialogue with artists past and present, Adams transforms geometry from a language of reduction into one of affirmation and multiplicity. His art reminds us that structure need not constrain expression—it can be the very medium through which representation finds new freedom.
RJG/AI