Adam Pendleton

spray light layer emerge

Upcoming
Sep 11 – Nov 2, 2025
Berlin

Pace is pleased to announce spray light layer emerge, an intimate selection of paintings and works on paper from Adam Pendleton’s Black Dada and Untitled (Days) bodies of work, presented across both floors of Die Tankstelle, the gallery’s new space in Berlin.

The exhibition’s title, spray light layer emerge, reflects the various “acts” played out in the Black Dada paintings: materially, theoretically, poetically, and ultimately, visually. The exhibition will be on view from September 11 through November 2, coinciding with Berlin Art Week.

A central figure in contemporary American painting, Pendleton is known for continuously redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. His paintings begin on paper by exploring the full breadth of mark-making. He layers paint, spray paint, ink, and watercolor, while integrating fragmentary text and geometric forms, often using stenciling techniques. These works on paper are photographed and then combined through a screen-printing process. Blurring distinctions between painting, drawing, and photography, the resulting paintings are tangible manifestations of his belief in painting as a powerful “visual and conceptual force.”

Pendleton’s Black Dada paintings, shown on the first floor, are conceptually rich and subtly expressionistic: thought-acts suspended in mid-flight, the ghost of an urban scrawl, the impression of dispersed and diffused light. Composed as diptychs on black-gessoed grounds, they direct attention to the fundamental attributes of painting—surface, edge, figure, ground—and to the artist’s unique approach to compositional logic and visual thought. Each painting features one or two hard-edged letters from the phrase BLACK DADA, which function as a “figure” within each composition. BLACK DADA refers to Pendleton’s ongoing exploration of conceptions of Blackness and abstraction. These textual characters hang, rest, or hover within the visual field—where drips, sprays, splatters, and other gestures play against an invisible grid set by the symmetry of the diptychs. By foregrounding the modes and methods of composition, Pendleton’s Black Dada works invite viewers to engage with and question the formal, conceptual, and material possibilities of painting itself.

On the ground floor, a selection of drawings further articulates Pendleton’s ongoing commitment to experimentation with mark-making, and with processes of transformation and translation across media.

Pendleton is currently the subject of a major exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen—his first solo exhibition in the city—runs from April 4, 2025, through January 3, 2027, and features new and recent paintings alongside a single-channel video. The exhibition highlights Pendleton’s singular contributions to contemporary American painting and engages with both the architecture of the museum and the historical context of the National Mall. In April 2026, Pendleton will also present a solo exhibition at the Langen Foundation in Neuss, Germany.

This May, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced its acquisition of all 35 works from Pendleton’s Who Is Queen? exhibition (2021–2022). This landmark acquisition includes paintings and drawings from the Black Dada and WE ARE NOT bodies of work, as well as three video works: Notes on Resurrection City, Notes on the Robert E. Lee Monument, Richmond VA (figure), and So We Moved: A Portrait of Jack Halberstam.

Pace will publish Adam Pendleton: An Abstraction this summer. Both a document and evolution of Pendleton’s first solo exhibition at Pace New York in a decade, the volume will feature a new text by Marc Glimcher.

Featured Works

Black Dada (B) by Adam Pendleton — Adam Pendleton, *Black Dada (B)*, 2025

Untitled (days for drawing) by Adam Pendleton — Adam Pendleton, *Untitled (days for drawing)*, 2023

Portrait of Adam Pendleton — Photo: Matthew Septimus

About the Artist

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984), a central figure in contemporary American painting, has redefined the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? (2021–22) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together (2021–22) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept (2022) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White and Light (2023–24) at the mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; Adam Pendleton: To Divide By (2023–24) at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; and Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics (2024-25) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

His work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Morgan Library & Museum, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and Tate, London. In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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