Sean Kelly is delighted to present SOIL, Lindsay Adams’s second exhibition with the gallery and her New York solo debut. This new body of work delves into Adams’s ongoing investigation into how paintings can emerge from a black ground, using darkness, not as absence, but as a generative foundation from which color, gesture, and form unfold. The exhibition opens on Thursday, April 16, with a reception from 6–8pm. The artist will be present.
“The sounds of color echo in my dreams. It is the magic I cannot quite explain. The alchemic decisions of line and mark are always connected by color, it is the beginning and end. Colors float through my mind, across time and dimension, where I think of my grandmother, Carrie Blue’s, pink peony tree that sat outside of her window, or the green and white house tucked between the mountains of Bedford, Virginia, where I played with cousins on Easter Sunday. I can feel the dark brown coffee that is labeled as black, and the black and white newspaper with small moments of full color sits on the kitchen table I’d see each morning, next to the phthalo table napkins. It is the answer and the questions, forcing me to confront both what I know and don’t know.
Black– it is both absence and presence. It is there, even when you can’t see it. The cover of night, the moments of rest in a cool dark room. It is the soil, the water, and the flowers. It is where I confront my burdens and where I lay my peace. Black understands light and darkness, and accepts all realities. It is both growth and decay, and stands, no matter the condition. Black, the ever beginning. Color, the decided end.” - Lindsay Adams
At the center of this exhibition is Adams’s sustained exploration of color and how it can expand and redefine space. Adams approaches color as a living, shifting material that is built, disrupted, and reimagined through process rather than predetermined meaning. She uses Lamp Black as both a material and conceptual starting point. Rather than functioning solely as ground, black operates as a threshold of visibility. Luminous blues, pinks, and yellows move across the surface in energetic brushstrokes. Color is not fixed but accumulative and responsive, emerging through a process of addition, removal, and rearticulation, with each layer carrying the essence of prior decisions. Adams’ gestures defy containment, the marks are unbound. Through chiaroscuro, she activates moments of luminosity and obscurity, allowing forms to emerge, recede, and dissolve within the surface.
Adams builds upon a long artistic lineage of artists engaging with the color black throughout the history of painting and abstraction. Painters as diverse as Francisco Goya, Eugène Delacroix, and Kazimir Malevich deployed black to evoke drama, horror, the psychological intensity of violence and struggle, and even spirituality over the ages. Adams repositions this legacy within a broader contemporary conversation among artists such as Mary Lovelace O’Neal and Raymond Sanders, whose practices similarly explore the conceptual and material possibilities of black within abstraction.
In SOIL, Adams reflects on questions of place, memory, and emotional terrain to create psychological landscapes rather than fixed imagery. In this way, each painting becomes a world built through experimentation, where memory, intuition, and material process converge. Rooted in a deep commitment to the possibilities of painting, the exhibition reveals Adams’s continued mastery of color, surface, and gesture, whilst affirming black as a generative ground from which new visual worlds can emerge.
Lindsay Adams lives and works in Chicago, IL. Adams received two BAs in International Studies: World Politics and Diplomacy and Spanish from the University of Richmond and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2025, her work was selected to be featured in the Obama Presidential Center opening in June. Adams’ work has been featured in a major solo exhibition at the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C., the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. Her work is included in major public and private collections. In 2024, she was recognized with the Helen Frankenthaler Award. She is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Silver Art Projects, the World Trade Center.
Lindsay Adams, born in Washington, D.C., is a visual artist whose practice is focused on painting and drawing. Employing her educational foundation as a social scientist, with a background in foreign relations, sociology, and cultural anthropology, her work systematically engages with precise critical analysis and a perceptive understanding of the complex fabric of social dynamics. Lindsay received BAs from the University of Richmond in both International Studies: World Politics and Diplomacy and Spanish, she has an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Sean Kelly Gallery was founded by its British-born owner in 1991 and operated privately in SoHo until 1995 when its first public space opened at 43 Mercer Street. During these formative years, it established a reputation for diverse, intellectually driven, unconventional exhibitions. The original list of artists represented included Marina Abramović, James Casebere, Callum Innes, Joseph Kosuth and Julião Sarmento – exemplifying the Gallery’s commitment to presenting important, challenging contemporary art.
