Woman in Optimum Blue

Derrick Adams works across mediums, often engaging the space between figuration and abstraction. He cites Romare Bearden as a major influence, though his paintings and prints nod equally to Mickalene Thomas’s richly textured collages and to the flat planes of early 20th-century Cubism. This diptych (which includes "Man in Tidal Blue," 2017.45.2) borrows from the constructed aesthetic of collage, pitting fields of hand-painted, modulated blue against blocks of texture and pattern, including wood grain and army camouflage, which recur throughout Adams’s oeuvre. The format of this work derives from Renaissance double portraiture, exemplified by Piero della Francesca’s portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino. Adams de- and re-constructs this precedent in a striking manner, replacing della Francesca’s white nobility with anonymous black subjects, whose skin he renders in a range of tones, rejecting any generalized notion of blackness while alluding to the aesthetics of low-res digital images and blocky color-identification technology.