Adam Pendleton: An Abstraction

Pace Gallery presents An Abstraction, the solo exhibition of American artist Adam Pendleton (b. 1984), on view from May 3–August 16, 2024. The twenty-five-work show, composed of twelve large-scale paintings and thirteen drawings, is a subtle departure from the artist’s earlier output, yet it continues to reflect how one might experience the world on a sensorial level—investigating Blackness as not only a color, but also an identity and an overarching method. Speaking to the multifaceted nature of Blackness, Pendleton toes the line between historical abstraction and the avant-garde, between past and present, and between clarity and indistinctness.

Pendleton notes that the forms in the works came first, followed by the paintings themselves and their corresponding spatial realities. Viewers are invited to absorb the relationships that ensue: those that are deliberate and those that are accidental, as the works are playful and specific all at once. The paintings and drawings are founded in the artist’s personal curiosity; they include stenciled letters pulled from the term “BLACK DADA,” graffiti-like to an extent, but with a more pronounced subtlety than audiences have previously seen from Pendleton. Acting as a compositional tool, these individual letters appear to be hanging in the paintings, allowing audiences to orient themselves in relation to each letter and to the works themselves. In Black Dada (K) (2023–24), a two-part silkscreen ink and black gesso on canvas painting, Pendleton has crafted a near-black background marred with dark black and neon green ink; the latter is ephemeral and invites the viewer to take in the artist’s movements. Then, stenciled with clarity and precision on the left-hand side of the canvas is the letter K in sheer black, beckoning from a sideways position. Immersive yet practically illegible, there’s a fragile dynamic in the work, a sense that Pendleton may have lost control—or did he? The artist’s movements are gestural and firmly planted in the body; the dripping paint is a deliberate act, and the perceived loss of control only occurs when the medium hits the paper. Pendleton refers to this as a “strange alchemy,” and the viewer would certainly agree. There’s a clear dynamic here, a dialogue about what the body is capable of both physically and mentally.

Black Dada (K) (2024), another two-part silkscreen ink and black gesso on canvas, features a blend of geometric shapes in bright red hues atop the same dark background, with the same black lettering nearly indecipherable in this case. Anarchic in nature, the work hints at the fragile dynamic between what a person can control and what comes more intuitively; the painting is an exposure, if you will, or an expression of the body’s capabilities. The artist highlights that painting is delicate and rather targeted in the same way it’s poetic and innate, with the former coming through in the stenciled K placed sideways to the right of the canvas, and everything else seemingly more erratic. This reinforces the concept of Black Dada as one of radical and remarkable juxtapositions; fragments, strokes, and erasure all factor into Pendleton’s artmaking. Here again, Black Dada (A/A) (2024) is no exception, with two As on separate planes of the two-part canvas—each one facing a different direction—exuding a sense of order amid the chaos of the work. Black and blue lines hint at a graffiti style, illegible at first but eventually coming together in a cohesive manner. The viewer might also consider Untitled (Days) (2023–24), a black-and-white painting reminiscent of a windshield in the rain, fusing light and shadow, lines and circular shapes; the paint drips and the illusion of graffiti lettering adorn the foreground once again. There’s order in the chaos and intentionality in the patterns that initially seem mercurial. Straight black lines interfere with each work, abstracting that which is already nonrepresentational.

An Abstraction allows Pendleton to return to his roots, if you will. The artist’s first solo exhibition at Pace Gallery in more than a decade, the show adds sculptural walls to Pendleton’s examination of Blackness and Black Dadaism. The paintings and drawings are connected to the first Black Dada work the artist completed in 2008, yet they’ve evolved significantly—because Pendleton is constantly pushing. The artist is pushing the bounds of what he can achieve via craft, or with material, or even in terms of detail. He notes that human beings feel even that which they don’t perceive, and for this reason, An Abstraction is meant to instill in the viewer the possibility of an encounter. The exhibition asks the viewer to consider themes like displacement and intention, with the Pace Gallery space helping to literalize the artist’s work.