Adam Pendleton

Pendleton's work proposes abstraction not as a retreat from the world but as a way of inhabiting it differently. Rather than treating abstraction as a closed formal language, he reconsiders its unfinished possibilities from the perspective of the present, where form remains inseparable from the historical and political forces through which it moves. Gesture, language, and geometry never resolve into stable images or fixed meanings. Instead, they remain in motion, continually reorganizing the conditions of perception and the act of making.

Installed within the central spaces of the museum's historic building, Some Wild Kind of Language positions the Stedelijk's architecture and collection as active components of the exhibition. Pendleton re-imagines the Stedelijk Museum's iconic staircase—one of the first "white cubes" in the world—as a "black cube," reorienting the relationship between his work and the museum's architecture. In the IMC Gallery, his paintings and drawings enter into dialogue with the legacies of modernism and abstraction, situating his practice within an ongoing conversation with the museum's collection and the broader history of art.

Process

Pendleton's painting process begins on paper, where he explores the full breadth of mark-making. He layers paint, spray paint, ink, and watercolor, integrating graffiti-like marks, fragmentary text, and geometric forms, often through stenciling techniques. These works on paper are documented and subsequently layered through a screen-printing process that deliberately moves between—and generatively conflates—the manual and the mechanical, rethinking how paintings can be made through successive stages of translation and transformation.

Across the exhibition, paintings and drawings unfold through a distilled layering of gesture, fragment, and form. Rather than centering on a single visual moment, Pendleton creates continuous, expansive fields—an "all-over" condition—that challenge conventional expectations of composition.

White Cube, Black Cube

In the iconic staircase of the museum's 1895 building, Pendleton engages one of its most historically significant spaces. In 1938, curator Willem Sandberg painted the staircase's dark-colored brick walls white to establish one of the earliest "white cubes," a transformation he later extended throughout the museum after becoming director in 1945.

Pendleton transforms the staircase into a "black cube" for the presentation of a new body of work: eight monumental Basis drawings. These are the largest drawings Pendleton has completed to date. Made with gold ink on matte black paper, they introduce gold not simply as a color but as a material that oscillates between illumination and opacity, presence and disappearance. Through gesture, repetition, and accumulation, each drawing functions as an active record of process, generating a shifting field of attention. Installed within the staircase's architectural niches, the works respond directly to the scale and rhythm of the historic space.

Histories of Abstraction

Pendleton's paintings, installed in the IMC Gallery, also known as the Gallery of Honour, occupy an important position within the museum's historical and contemporary collections. Bringing together works of different scales—including a painting measuring nearly six meters wide—the exhibition creates an encounter between Pendleton's practice and the histories of Minimalism, Conceptual art, and post-war abstraction represented in the museum's collection.

Pendleton's Black Dada, Days, and monumental WE ARE NOT paintings can be understood both as a continuation of and a response to the large-scale works by artists such as Barnett Newman, Morris Louis, and other North American Color Field and Minimal painters that the Stedelijk historically presented in the same gallery.

"Black Dada gives me permission to break rules," says Pendleton. "Don't tell me how a painting should be made, or the limits of abstraction or language. Don't tell me what a Black artist should or should not do, or the look and feel of Blackness. Black Dada is precise, generatively capacious, and unfolds in real time.”

Rein Wolfs, Director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and curator of the exhibition: “Adam Pendleton’s work bridges the modernist with the contemporary and serves as a missing link between the history and the now of the Stedelijk. His way of changing the historic architecture at the heart of the museum is a perfect match with the changing attitude of the museum towards more global perspectives.”

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