David Cohen reviews the exhibition Marina Adams: Coming Thru Strange at Hionas Gallery, New York, on view through March 24, 2013.

Cohen writes: "At ease and optically generous as these paintings are, they are actually radically cropped because gestalt depends upon something beyond the canvas itself. The edge of the picture, indeed, rarely defines the composition, even less the boundary of an individual shape. This imparts narrative and metaphor to works that would otherwise want to feel present tense and literal. Adams’ target-like compositions, like Space Embrace, (2011) are almost programmatic in the way they soften, “feminize” even (her bulls eye is difficult not to read as a breast) that trope of modernist hard-edge… But rather than suggesting Adams as some kind of soft neo-romantic, these strategies come across more as 'post hard,' as if her relationships to Mangold, Kenneth Noland (targets) or Ellsworth Kelly are akin to Eva Hesse’s to Donald Judd.