Eenwerk, Amsterdam
04 September - 19 October 2025
EENWERK HELLO initiates a new strand of its programme hosting international galleries expanding its own activities and the Amsterdam context with perspectives from contemporary art galleries worldwide. This September Sadie Coles HQ say hello with a new work by Alex Da Corte.
BAM! BAM! BAM! is a painting triptych featuring the iconic comic canine Snoopy, and it will be shown alongside three of Da Corte’s ongoing puzzle sculptures. In the EENWERK library, a selection of weird and wonderful printed matter from the artist's collection will be complemented by material from Irma Boom's library.
For his first exhibition in Amsterdam, the Venezuelan-American artist continues his series of Object Paintings, which bring key elements of the composition ‘out of bo unds’, developing his longstanding practice of painting-in-reverse in the style of traditional animation cels by placing the cartoon symbol in the scene as a sculptural element that grows outside of the work, stretching and defying the conventional authority of the frame.
Da Corte both utilises and unravels the cues of childhood comics, pushing familiar expressions of hope, love and stability into uncanny places where they don’t historically belong. In the three frames, subtly tweaked from an eight-panel Sunday newspaper strip from 30 October 1966, Snoopy considers a front door to a home. First an approach, where everything seems possible. Then the creature wants something – the central image’s onomatopoeic text reading ‘BAM! BAM! BAM!’ amplifies their excitement, or growing impatience. A burst of warm light in the final frame tells of satisfaction, a resolution, though the viewer will never know why or what for. Snoopy occupies each frame in a single sweeping movement, amplifying time in a manner that is at once frozen and dilated by the jumping format of the storyboard narrative. The work hinges around a central act of violence: as Snoopy attempts to kick down the door, it is unclear whether it is entitlement, lust or peril motivating their aggression. The chopped, cyclical nature of Da Corte’s story speaks to an American animation that does not end, and the possible meanings that grow within its flicker.