Alicia Adamerovich “Second Nature”

In her latest compositions resembling nightscapes and tortuous caves, Adamerovich explores the liminal spaces of the body, anchoring the viewer mid-journey within corporeal tunnels.

Adamerovich’s technical practice is rooted in relief – the adding and taking away of value with light and shadow. The artist applies this concept across multiple mediums including drawing, wood carving and painting, collapsing each medium onto the other. Her graphite and pastel drawings, for example, are often framed in hand-carved wooden frames, meant to contain or even mimic her landscapes. Alternatively, her paintings begin as black-gesso foundations upon which Adamerovich essentially carves away, giving rise to organic forms that emerge onto the foreground. Those organic forms then reappear in a cast of carved wooden sculptures resembling domestic furniture.

Inspired by the Biomorphic, Precisionist and Surrealist movements of the early 20th century, Adamerovich has developed a unique visual language, employing primordial and universal feminine archetypes such as the moon-ova to allude to themes of fertility, ovulation and genesis; and the portal-womb to symbolize the cyclical and endless conduits of transformation and change.  

But rather than reiterating these correlations, Adamerovich highlights the differences between these oft-paired indices: the eternal and infinite cycles of the moon are captured and contained, restrained by time, portraying the limited and determined cycle of human life. In other images, the voids and spaces of the human body and natural world, passageways and channels from one point to another, seemingly begin and lead to nowhere. Within this context, Adamerovich’s leery and trepid landscapes are rendered into psychological portraits.

Adamerovich ceases space and time and gives them shape, expanding and stretching them into perpetuity. Void of beginning or end, past or future, the works become allegories on the nature of time, specifically the insecurity and instability of what remains in between – the weighty, undefined present – and our reluctance to remain within it.

Press release and images via Del Vaz Projects.