Adam Pendleton
“An Abstraction”
New York, 540 West 25th Street
An Abstraction follows a series of significant solo exhibitions by the artist at museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2021; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2022; and mumok - Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna in 2023. 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 will 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.
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.
