Adam Pendleton: Who We Are

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984) 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 honoured with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Pendleton’s 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 colours 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 site-specific 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.