Derrick Adams Blends Humour and Alarm

A toothy smile spreads across the face of a man cooked into a pastry and about to be eaten alive in Derrick Adams’s recent painting Baked In (2024). Adams has often described this mixture of humour and alarm in his art as ‘seriocomic’. Over the past seven years, his distinctive mixed-media works have fused Black Americana aesthetics with African imagery to create scenes that amuse as much as they explore the weightier truths of being a Black American. For Adams, the outcome of this juxtaposition is frequently optimistic: his works have shown Black people in moments of joy or repose, at peace with the complexities of their identities. While he deftly accomplishes the same balance between levity and sincerity in his most recent show, ‘Situation Comedy’ at Gagosian Davies Street, the usually upbeat tone of his humour seems to have been replaced by a darker undercurrent.

Rendered in the artist’s trademark geometric patchwork of brown shades, the protagonist of Baked In is partially subsumed within a pie, from which only his arms and feet poke out, although the trace of his outline remains visible. Each exposed foot is pinned down by an American flag, while other elements of the composition – the red-and-white gingham background, the fireworks, the knife and fork framing the dish – all suggest that the man has become part of an Independence Day meal. One of the oblong steam vents on the pie lid lines up perfectly with the man’s groin – the large pastry cut-out suggestive of an erect penis. While this composition initially prompts a snicker, the figure’s fate as someone’s final course is an unsettling harbinger of a violent future. Here, the extractive consumption of Black bodies within the broader national heritage is as American as apple pie on the 4th of July. 

Adams’s works also look to the past. In Getting the Bag (2024), an eagle holds the handles of a Telfar handbag in its beak while facing away from a Black man, wearing a white Stetson hat and a domino mask. The eagle represents America, the designer bag symbolizing the country’s cultural obsession with money and consumerism (in contemporary slang, ‘getting the bag’ means to acquire a large sum of money). Far in the distance, perched atop a cliff, is a tepee from which smoke rings emanate, descending into the foreground. The figure of the cowboy has traditionally been pictured as a white man whose rugged dominance single-handedly tamed supposedly wild lands and people, assimilating them into the American nation. Here, the trope of Cowboys and Indians, and with it the ideal of expansion and conquest, is refigured to offer the uneasy hero role to a Black man. Given America’s history of enslavement, segregation under Jim Crow laws and other systematic abuses directed towards Black people, placing a Black man in the cowboy’s dominant position feels awkward at best and traitorous at worst.  No matter what role the Black man has, aspirational or otherwise, he cannot seem to win. 

Other works, such as Adams’s three ‘Pot Head’ canvases (all 2025), offer humour through wordplay. The paintings take the insult literally to reclaim and reconfigure it into something elegant: profiles of Black people crowned with pots designed with faces evoking West African masks. There is visual comedy on display, too: Good Egg, Bad Bunny (2024) shows an Easter Egg hunt, in which an anthropomorphized chocolate rabbit has chunks bitten out of its legs. These works may be humorous, but they also suggest stifled distress: the figures in ‘Pot Head’ must each carry a heavy weight gracefully, whilst the rabbit in Good Egg, Bad Bunny smiles through ostensible pain. Ultimately, whatever the source of the initial laughter, once it comes and goes, an unsettling quiet follows.

Derrick Adams’s ‘Situation Comedy’ is on view at Gagosian Davies Street, London, until 29 March 

^{Main image: Derrick Adams, Only Happy Thoughts (detail), 2024, acrylic and fabric collage on wood panel, 153 × 153 cm. Courtesy: © Derrick Adams Studio and Gagosian, London}