Stedelijk Museum AmsterdamMuseumplein / Amsterdam-Zuid
Adam Pendleton — Some Wild Kind of Language
Pendleton's first museum exhibition in the Netherlands: eleven paintings and eight large-scale drawings exploring abstract form, most of them never shown before.
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The Stedelijk's grand staircase has been white since 1938, when curator Willem Sandberg painted over its dark brick to make one of the first white cubes. Adam Pendleton has painted it black. You climb past eight Basis drawings in gold ink on matte black paper, set into the stairwell's arched niches. They are the largest drawings he has made.
The ten paintings hang in the Gallery of Honour, where the museum used to show Barnett Newman and Morris Louis. Pendleton starts them on paper with paint, spray paint, stencils and scraps of text, then builds them up in screen-printed layers. One is nearly six metres wide. Anyone who has rolled an Amsterdam flat back to white for the landlord's final inspection will appreciate the nerve of going the other way.
This is his first museum show in the Netherlands, and most of the work has never been shown. Everything is in the 1895 building: the staircase and the gallery at its centre.
Look for
The black staircase
Look up the 1895 stairwell, white since Sandberg's 1938 repaint and now black, with the eight gold-on-black Basis drawings set into its arched niches.
Untitled (Basis), 2026
A four-part drawing in gold ink on black paper, where the gold reads as light in one spot and goes dull in the next.
The colour-field paintings
Canvases where a field of red, purple, green or blue meets black, each one different in palette, scale or kind of mark.
Black Dada (A), 2024
A two-part canvas of silkscreen ink over black gesso, stencilled letters and graffiti-like marks layered into one dense surface.
Good for
- Nerding Out
- Out-Of-Town Guests
Skip if
You want pictures of something: every work here is abstract, built from marks, stencils and text fragments.
Free in the same building
Plan a visit to Stedelijk Museum AmsterdamAlso at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
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Image credits
8
- Yoshitoshi. Master of the MoonCourtesy of Van Gogh Museum
- Whistler. Dandy and DisruptorCourtesy of Van Gogh Museum
- Willem de Kooning at WorkCourtesy of Rijksmuseum
- Stedelijk Museum AmsterdamJohn Lewis Marshall, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Van Gogh MuseumSteven Lek, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Moco MuseumC messier, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- RijksmuseumTrougnouf (Benoit Brummer) / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
- Museum Van LoonRijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0