Margareth Adama

Margareth Adama was born in Jakarta and grew up in Amsterdam. She completed her HBS before attending the Rietveld Academy, followed by studies in cultural anthropology, art history of Southeast Asia, and philosophy. Adama ran galleries in Amsterdam and later Amersfoort, and exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam with two group exhibitions in 1978 and 1979, as well as a performance. From 1980 to 1987, she was part of the Visual Artists Regulation. In 1986, she co-founded Villa Baranka with Fridi Martina, an interdisciplinary project combining painting, theater, music, and thematic dinners until 1988. In November 2018, the Villa Baranka archive was transferred to ATRIA, the knowledge institute for emancipation and women's history. In 1996, Adama founded Capella Almadama in Amersfoort, an Art & Education center that operated until 2002. The center organized new exhibitions of her work with poems and concerts every six weeks, where audiences selected which paintings would be performed. During this period, she developed workshops including a dynamic leadership program for Business University Nyenrode that combined painting with leadership analysis. In 2002, she moved to Maria Hoop, where she established a gallery, studio, and coaching practice. Adama held a retrospective exhibition titled "Madama Modern Sacred Art from the Heart" in 2016 at the ECI Culture Factory Roermond. She developed a process of painting large unstretched canvases on both sides that hang freely in space as sculptures. Her recent Color Temple project consists of twelve canvases measuring 220 by 150 centimeters, each with a monochrome side and an emblem side on white background, created between 2017 and 2019. She has published three books: Heaven Gates (2005), I Am Maria Hoop (2010), and The New Current: Art as Medicine of Being (2013), a bilingual work with 366 images and poems.