ART CITIES: N.York-Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton is a New York–based artist whose work uses linguistic, political, and historical material in unlikely forms and configurations. He creates paintings, drawings, moving-image works, sculptures, and installations that transform received narratives about the past, breaking down rigid historical categories to open up new possibilities and directions for the future.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

Adam Pendleton’s first solo show at Pace’s New York gallery in ten years, “An Abstraction” follows a series of significant solo exhibitions by the artist. The return to his home city marks a continuation of his career-long project of creating spaces of engagement and “fighting for the right to exist in and through abstraction”. Pendleton’s work indexes and documents the physical process of painting to create layered pictorial fields that—in their painterly, psychic, and verbal expressions—announce a new mode of visual composition for the 21st century. He is guided by a visual and structural philosophy he has termed “Black Dada,” an ongoing inquiry into Blackness and its relationship to abstraction and conceptions of the avant-garde. Investigating Blackness as a color and theoretical proposition, the artist’s work reflects a contrapuntal understanding of the world in both sensorial and conceptual terms. In “An Abstraction”, the artist’s 12 paintings and 13 drawings hang within a monumental, site-specific architecture consisting of five black triangular forms. These sculptural walls will reorder the gallery into new, unexpected spaces and extend the visual language of the exhibited works. Bringing together the artist’s “Black Dada” and “Untitled (Days)” bodies of work, the new paintings and drawings in the exhibition feature a variety of marks (spray painting, stenciled geometric forms, and expressionistic brushstrokes) to blur distinctions between painting, drawing, and photography and propose painting as a documentary and performative act. In 2008, in his Black Dada manifesto, Adam Pendleton declared, “History is an endless variation, a machine upon which we can project ourselves and our ideas. That is to say it is our present moment.” Pendleton’s work attempts to align seemingly disparate histories of artistic form and political action, striving to articulate “the ways in which we simultaneously possess and are possessed by contradictory ideals and ideas”. In 2008, Pendleton began to develop his work through the idea of Black Dada, an evolving inquiry into the relationships between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde, and their respective histories. “Black Dada is a way to talk about the future while talking about the past,” Pendleton writes. Rooted in American poet Amiri Baraka’s 1964 poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” and German poet Hugo Ball’s 1916 “Dada Manifesto,” Pendelton’s Black Dada is the name of an early text/performance and, soon after, a series of paintings. Pendleton’s new “Black Dada” works imbue his iconic black and white compositions with focused and saturated colors. Each of the paintings and drawings in this body of work bears one or more typographic letters from the phrase “BLACK DADA,” rendered in a sans serif font amid the artist’s gestural marks. Continually transposing and overwriting these two modes of inscription, Pendleton cultivates a living library of his own ever-evolving gestures and processes. Paintings and drawings from Pendleton’s “Untitled (Days)” body of work capture a microhistory of marks and impressions: drips, splatters, strokes, erasures, shapes, word fragments. These are the accumulated gestures left over from work undertaken in Pendleton’s painting studio, remnants arranged in all-over compositions dense with visual texture. Together, these paintings constitute an index of what it takes to make a painting.

Photo: Adam Pendleton, Untitled (Days), 2023-24, silkscreen ink and black gesso on canvas, 50″ × 60″ (127 cm × 152.4 cm), © Adam Pendleton, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

Info: Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 3/5-16/8/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/