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Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2019, silkscreen ink on canvas, 96" × 69" (243.8 cm × 175.3 cm) © Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton is a New York-based artist and a central figure amongst a cross-generational group of painters defining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction in the 21st century.

Known for formally inventive and conceptually rigorous works that blur distinctions between the act of painting, drawing, and photography, Pendleton’s paintings and drawings feature a variety of sprayed, stenciled, and layered gestures, as well as textual fragments and fields. A polymath, Pendleton also edits critical anthologies, makes films, and composes site-specific exhibitions and sculptural interventions. For over a decade, Pendleton has articulated his approach to art through the framework of Black Dada, an evolving inquiry into the relationship between Blackness and abstraction.

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Adam Pendleton, Black Dada (A/K), 2017–18, silkscreen ink on canvas, 2 panels: 48" × 76" (121.9 cm × 193 cm), each; 96" × 76" (243.8 cm × 193 cm), overall © Adam Pendleton

Pendleton has been the subject of solo exhibitions worldwide at institutions including the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (2018); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2020); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021); mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2023); and Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2023–2024), among many others. His forthcoming solo exhibition, Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen, presented at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., will debut in the spring of 2025. Writing for The New York Times, Siddhartha Mitter described the critically acclaimed 2021 exhibition, Who Is Queen?, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 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.”

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Adam Pendleton, Untitled (A Victim of American Democracy), 2017, silkscreen ink and spray paint on canvas, 84" × 60" (213.36 cm × 152.40 cm) © Adam Pendleton

In 2024 Pendleton received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The artist’s work is held in major public collections worldwide including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Tate, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

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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. Installation view at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2019). © Adam Pendleton

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Adam Pendleton, Untitled (masks), 2018, silkscreen ink on mylar, overall dimensions variable 51-1/2" × 39-1/2" (130.8 cm × 100.3 cm), 4 sheets, each 54-5/16" × 42-5/16" (138 cm × 107.5 cm), 4 artist's frame, each © Adam Pendleton

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Adam Pendleton, OK DADA OK BLACK DADA OK (WE NEED), 2018, silkscreen ink and spray paint on canvas, 84" × 60" (213.4 cm × 152.4 cm) © Adam Pendleton

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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, 9-13/16" × 9-13/16" × 3-1/8" (24.9 cm × 24.9 cm × 7.9 cm) © Adam Pendleton

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Adam Pendleton, System of Display, I (WRITING/Art of Black Africa, Kunsthaus Zurich, 1970), 2018, silkscreen ink on plexiglass and mirror, 9-13/16" × 9-13/16" × 3-1/8" (24.9 cm × 24.9 cm × 7.9 cm) © Adam Pendleton