Adam Pendleton

In Abstraction

Past
Sep 7 – Oct 5, 2022
Geneva

Exhibition Details:

Adam Pendleton
In Abstraction
Sep 7 – Oct 5, 2022

Gallery:

Quai des Bergues 15-17
Geneva

Press:

Press Release (EN)
Press Release (FR)
Press Release (DE)

Connect:

(opens in a new window) @pacegallery
(opens in a new window) @pendleton.adam

Above: Adam Pendleton, Untitled (Days), 2021-22 © Adam Pendleton

Pace Gallery is pleased to present Adam Pendleton: In Abstraction. The artist’s first solo exhibition in Geneva, it features eight new paintings and four new drawings, and it is presented concurrently with (opens in a new window) Adam Pendleton: Toy Soldier at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich. Together these two exhibitions speak to the range of his practice.

“How do you make sense, on an emotional, intellectual, and pragmatic level, of the visual residue one leaves behind?”, Pendleton asks. Adam Pendleton: In Abstraction captures a microhistory of marks and impressions: drips, splatters, strokes, erasures, shapes, word fragments. These are the accumulated remnants left over from work undertaken in his painting studio, remnants that have been composited to create richly textured visual fields.

On the Untitled (Days) canvases, the first to be executed at this size, the textures run dense. Layered marks and sprays are dispersed all over. Blacks and whites range from the lightly translucent to the deeply opaque. On the other side of the room, the Black Dada Drawings reformat the same source material, shifting in scale and focus. The tonal contrast is dramatically reduced—black on black—and the cropping is often tighter and closer, highlighting smaller moments. Pendleton has described his paintings as an inquiry into the composition of subjectivity from the visual residue one leaves behind; indeed, in both the paintings and the drawings, “minor moments become major moments because of how they articulate who we are or who we might be at any given moment. It's a visual poetics of disruption.”

Pendleton frequently cites counterpoint as a signature of his work, referring to the kind of musical composition in which multiple simultaneous voices are organized with an emphasis on horizontal movement instead of strictly vertical synchronization. To the degree that each of the works is organized, contrapuntal lines form interference patterns and parallaxes. Similarly, the day-to-day remains of a studio practice are visible here only in their continuous displacement, passing through various modes and mechanisms of abstraction. The work asks us to examine these modes and mechanisms more closely, to notice the ways in which they configure and reconfigure our attention and intentions.

Featured Works

Untitled (Days) by Adam Pendleton — Adam Pendleton, *Untitled (Days)*, 2021-2022, silkscreen ink on canvas, 50" × 60" (127 cm × 152.4 cm)

Black Dada Drawing (B) by Adam Pendleton — Adam Pendleton, *Black Dada Drawing (B)*, 2022, silkscreen ink on paper, in artist's frame, 18-3/16" × 28-1/2" (46.2 cm × 72.4 cm), 2 sheets, each 36-3/8" × 28-1/2" (92.4 cm × 72.4 cm), overall 38" × 30-1/2" × 1-1/2" (96.5 cm × 77.5 cm × 3.8 cm), framed

Installation Views

PENDLETON_portrait_2019_02-High+Resolution+—+300+dpi+.jpg

About the Artist

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of several significant solo and group exhibitions; most recently, he was chosen to participate in the 2022 Whitney Biennial in New York. His major installation at MoMA, 2021’s Who is Queen?, garnered significant critical acclaim. In 2023, Pendleton will stage a comprehensive solo exhibition at mumok, Vienna.

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