Adam Pendleton’s work is a reflection of how we increasingly move through and experience the world on a sensorial level – a form of abstraction that, in its painterly, psychic and verbal expression, announces a new mode of visual composition for the twenty-first century. It investigates Blackness as a colour, an identity, a method and a political subject – in short, as a multitude. His work also poses questions about the legacy of modernism in the present day, reactivating ideas from historic avant-gardes across mediums and moments in time. Since 2008, Pendleton has articulated much of his work through the frame of Black Dada, an evolving enquiry into the relationships between Blackness, abstraction and the avant-garde. It’s a visual philosophy that confounds the distinctions between legibility and abstraction, past and present, familiar and strange, reminding us that meaning always develops through difference.
‘This desire for fragmentation, which Pendleton situates in the formal logics of painting techniques, insists upon far more than the figure-ground spatial relation of the medium. Rather, he is positing the potential of painting through a repeated layering of the self […] represented in this instance through the mode of communication by which something we call the self is expressed in the world: language. Its resistance to legibility, its deference to an existence in a different register, tone, and level, results in a poetic observation that wavers in the streaks and marks imprinted in Pendleton’s hand on the work and in the blabbering, stuttering, disappearing words that question how abstraction functions and how the fragment acts upon the whole.’
A. Edwards ‘Adam Pendleton: Here Is Your Language’, in Adam Pendleton, Berlin: Phaidon, 2020, p. 62
