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Thomas Dane Gallery is pleased to present Disclosure, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of American musician, scholar, composer, performer and sculptor Terry Adkins (b. 1953, Washington, D.C., d. 2014, New York). The exhibition brings Adkins’s early sculptures from the 1980s into conversation with work produced in the last decade of his life, drawing out the persisting themes developed, elaborated and refined throughout his career, before his untimely death in 2014.

After taking up printmaking as his initial foray into the visual arts, in the 1980s Adkins turned his focus to sculpture. He developed a sculptural language characterised by substantial, abstract forms using primarily found metal and wood, including varieties collected during travels to the Caribbean. In the organic, geometrically elegant early works like Elixir (1986) and Passenger (1988) presented in this exhibition, the lexicon of his early influences is clearly evident, and the distinctive kernels of Adkins’s later practice already present: found materials, improvisatory combinations, handmade construction, haptic surfaces, symbolism and post-minimalist considerations. Emblematic of this period is Word (1986), a concise, enigmatic piece realised through the integration of found metals and wood with plaster. Lying horizontally on the gallery floor, the work recalls Minimalist aesthetics while subverting the genre’s fetishism for slickness in the use of naturally patinated iron and brass, baring their weathered quality to reveal what Adkins referred to as ‘the potential expression’ embedded in found objects. He favoured used and utilitarian materials – ‘things made by other hands for other purposes’, as he put it – for the immaterial qualities accrued in the object through human use or labour.

Adkins worked improvisationally and often quickly, noting he was always careful not to overwork his sculptures in order to maintain a sense of immediacy and transience, to retain what he described as the ‘essence’ of the original objects. At the same time, his creations bear the imprint of the artist’s hand, from the rough-hewn surfaces left by a handsaw to the tactile paint application visible, for instance, in Titan (1988) and Mercury (1986), works that inventively transform found wood into poetic, even contemplative expressions.

In later years, a central aspect of Adkins’s practice would be dedicated to what he called ‘recitals’: a series of installations that brought together sculpture, performance, music, video and historical research to form a multisensorial tribute to the legacy of illustrious – and often overlooked – figures in African American cultural history. The term recital reflects the deep influence of music in Adkins’s life and art – from his early experience of church choir as a child and his close involvement in the D.C. jazz scene in his twenties, to his interest in African sculpture in the context of traditional African cultural practices in which sculpture played a synesthetic role alongside dance and music. His recitals were distinctively multi-sensorial, in which sound, form and image were inextricable.