Adam Pendleton is a central figure among a cross-generational group of painters redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
His visually distinct and conceptually rigorous paintings begin on paper with drips, splatters, sprays, geometric shapes, words and phrases, and inky fragments reminiscent of broken letters. These compositions are photographed and then layered using a screen-printing process, purposefully blurring the distinctions between the act of painting, the act of drawing, and photography. An encounter with any single work, typically composed of two colors on black gessoed grounds, brings forth the immediacy of gestural abstraction, the considered execution of minimal and conceptual art, and the playfulness of concrete poetry.
Pendleton is decidedly a polymath who edits critical anthologies, makes films, and composes sitespecific exhibitions and sculptural interventions. Writing for The New York Times, Siddhartha Mitter described his critically acclaimed 2021 exhibition, Who Is Queen?, at the Museum of Modern Art as one that "built [its] own museum inside MoMA – an experiment in change from within, offering a radically different method of display from the chronological unfolding of the Modernist canon in the institution's galleries." For over a decade, Pendleton has articulated his approach to art through the framework of Black Dada, an ever-evolving inquiry into the relationship between Blackness and abstraction.
Untitled (WE ARE NOT)
2021
Silkscreen ink on canvas
305 x 366 cm / 120 x 144 in
© Adam Pendleton
Untitled (WE ARE NOT)
2020–2021
Silkscreen ink on canvas
244 x 305 cm / 96 x 120 in
© Adam Pendleton
Untitled (WE ARE NOT)
2020
Silkscreen ink on canvas
244 x 175.5 cm / 96 × 69 in
© Adam Pendleton
Untitled (WE ARE NOT)
2019
Silkscreen ink on canvas
244 x 305 cm / 96 x 120 in
© Adam Pendleton
Untitled (WE ARE NOT)
2019
Silkscreen ink on canvas
244 × 175.5 cm / 96 × 69 in
© Adam Pendleton
Untitled (masks)
2019
Silkscreen ink on Mylar, 4 parts
Overall dimensions variable
Sheet, each 131 x 101 cm / 51 1/2 x 39 1/2 in
Frame, each 138 x 108 cm / 54 1/4 x 42 1/4 in
© Adam Pendleton
Black Dada (A/A)
2019
Silkscreen ink on canvas, 2 parts
Overall dims. 244 × 193 cm / 96 × 76 in
Panel, each 122 × 193 cm / 48 × 76 in
© Adam Pendleton
Black Dada Drawing (C)
2018–2019
Silkscreen on paper
Sheet 66.5 × 53 cm / 26 1/8 × 20 3/4 in
Frame 71 × 57 cm / 27 13/16 × 22 7/16 in
© Adam Pendleton
Black Dada Drawing (D/D)
2018
Silkscreen ink on paper
Sheet 66.5 × 53 cm / 26 1/8 × 20 3/4 in
Frame 71 × 57 cm / 27 13/16 × 22 7/16 in
© Adam Pendleton
Ishmael in the Garden: A Portrait of Ishmael Houston-Jones
2018
Black-and-white and color video, 24 minutes 15 seconds
Dimensions variable
© Adam Pendleton
System of Display, I (WRITING/Art of Black Africa, Kunsthaus Zurich, 1970)
2018
Silkscreen ink on plexiglass and mirror
25 x 25 x 8 cm / 9 7/8 x 9 7/8 x 3 1/8 in
© Adam Pendleton
System of Display, D (AROUND/Jean-Marie Straub, Not Reconciled, Or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules, 1965)
2011
Silkscreen ink on plexiglass and mirror
25 x 25 x 8 cm / 9 7/8 x 9 7/8 x 3 1/8 in
© Adam Pendleton
