Adam Pendleton Unveils Black Dada at Stedelijk — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Adam Pendleton's exhibition "Some Wild Kind of Language" opens Oct. 10 at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the source frames the show as one that will "upend expectations."
- In his Clinton Hill, Brooklyn studio, Pendleton starts every drawing and painting with a black ground as his primer, then layers marks, colors, and sometimes lettering before erasing, smudging, and returning to black.
- Pendleton has called his long-term project "Black Dada," a term borrowed from Amiri Baraka's 1964 poem "Black Dada Nihilismus," which the source describes as a radical rejection of Western art and a call for a Black aesthetic.
- Pendleton's works typically emerge from literal blackness and are marked by fragments of language and erasure, with the source noting he could be read as a Neo-Expressionist painter working mostly in shades of black.
Why it matters: By mounting a solo show built around his long-running "Black Dada" project — drawn from Amiri Baraka's 1964 poem — at one of Amsterdam's flagship art institutions, Pendleton brings his process of layering and erasing over a black ground to a major European museum audience, with the source noting the exhibition is designed to upend expectations.
Ask SkimNews
