Adam Pendleton Is Painting the White Cube Black

Adam Pendleton’s art studio in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, is a pristine white-cube gallery, with an office and a narrow library filled floor to ceiling with art books.

All the creative work takes place in a single large, light-filled room, where colors are splashed across tables, dripping down the walls, and bleeding into strips of paper, as prismatic rain.

Pendleton could easily be seen as a Neo-Expressionist painter who works mostly in shades of black. He starts all his drawings and paintings with a black ground, which acts as his primer, and then adds marks, colors, and sometimes lettering in a range of hues. Then he might erase all of that, smudge it out, and leave a few traces. Then it’s back to black.

He has called his long-term artistic project “Black Dada,” a term he borrowed from Amiri Baraka’s 1964 poem, “Black Dada Nihilismus,” a radical rejection of Western art and a call for a Black aesthetic.

The term points Pendleton in a range of political and philosophical directions, but is best defined by his own artworks, which usually emerge from literal blackness, and are marked by fragments of language and erasure.

In person, Pendleton is hyperverbal — unlike many artists who wish the work to speak for itself. He just wants those words to be as fleeting and intangible as his marks on the canvas. It’s a trait that is both liberating and occasionally confounding. One of the words he uses a lot is “upend” — as in, upending expectations or perceptions.

On Oct. 10, Pendleton’s latest exhibition, “Some Wild Kind of Language,” opens at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, one of Europe’s first white-box museums. At its center is an architectural highlight, a grand 19th-century stairway that creates a sense of drama as visitors climb to the main exhibitions halls. Pendleton plans to paint it all black, for what the museum says is the first time since 1895.

Around the stairway, he’ll display 8 large-scale drawings, gold ink on black paper, and there will be 10 abstract paintings in another exhibition hall in various hues. Some have lettering or partial sentences such as, “We Are Not.”

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