2025, Adam Pendleton, Black Dada (L) -- Hirshhorn Museum (Washington) (special exhibition)
From the museum label:
Love, Queen, Adam Pendleton's (b. Richmond, Virginia, 1984; lives in Brooklyn, New York) first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, brings together recent works to highlight the centrality of painting, as well as the translation and transformation of the handmade mark, in his practice. Since he began making art in the early 2000s, Pendleton has developed an expansive approach to art-making that employs gesture, fragment, text, and image to recontextualize histories of painting, abstraction, Blackness, and the historical avant-garde. Deploying collage as model and method, Pendleton places traditionally separate ideas and processes in close proximity, creating a fluid state that opens up new spaces for seeing and thinking.
Love, Queen includes paintings from five bodies of work: Black Dada, Untitled (Days), WE ARE NOT, Composition, and Movement. Challenging convention through their blurring of distinctions among painting, photography, and drawing, Pendleton's visually active and spatially complex paintings give visual form to what the artist describes as the "complex real"—the onslaught of sensory phenomena and often contradictory information that defines contemporary experience.
His painting process begins on paper by exploring the full breadth of mark-making. He layers paint, spray paint, ink, and watercolor, integrating fragmentary text and geometric forms through stenciling techniques. These works on paper are photographed and then layered using a screen-printing process. The resulting paintings—simultaneously expressionistic, minimal, and conceptually rich—feature both stark contrasts and subtle variations in tone and finish. They are a tangible manifestation of his belief in painting as a powerful "visual and conceptual force."
2025, Adam Pendleton, Black Dada (L) -- Hirshhorn Museum (Washington) (special exhibition)
From the museum label:
Love, Queen, Adam Pendleton's (b. Richmond, Virginia, 1984; lives in Brooklyn, New York) first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, brings together recent works to highlight the centrality of painting, as well as the translation and transformation of the handmade mark, in his practice. Since he began making art in the early 2000s, Pendleton has developed an expansive approach to art-making that employs gesture, fragment, text, and image to recontextualize histories of painting, abstraction, Blackness, and the historical avant-garde. Deploying collage as model and method, Pendleton places traditionally separate ideas and processes in close proximity, creating a fluid state that opens up new spaces for seeing and thinking.
Love, Queen includes paintings from five bodies of work: Black Dada, Untitled (Days), WE ARE NOT, Composition, and Movement. Challenging convention through their blurring of distinctions among painting, photography, and drawing, Pendleton's visually active and spatially complex paintings give visual form to what the artist describes as the "complex real"—the onslaught of sensory phenomena and often contradictory information that defines contemporary experience.
His painting process begins on paper by exploring the full breadth of mark-making. He layers paint, spray paint, ink, and watercolor, integrating fragmentary text and geometric forms through stenciling techniques. These works on paper are photographed and then layered using a screen-printing process. The resulting paintings—simultaneously expressionistic, minimal, and conceptually rich—feature both stark contrasts and subtle variations in tone and finish. They are a tangible manifestation of his belief in painting as a powerful "visual and conceptual force."