Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton - Galerie Max Hetzler Selected Works
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Spanning painting, performance, video and writing, Adam Pendleton's (b. 1984) practice is profoundly eclectic and critical. The artist engages with problematics inherent to mechanisms of representation, delving into language, abstraction and the notion of “blackness”. Working predominantly in black and white, Pendleton unpicks and deconstructs dominant historical, political, socio-cultural and aesthetic discourses, putting forward alternative narratives. Within his own concept of "Black Dada", the artist investigates the past in order to “imagine alternate presents”. Relying on appropriation, Pendleton creates works merge references ranging from Dadaism to the Black Arts Movement.

"Pendleton is a rare artist in his ability to synthesise disciplines and mediums, and to steer with collaborators towards “total works,” which yet remain drafts of a larger essayistic practice. His works—like those of his many avant-garde forebears—are experimental in the truest sense. He sets up a laboratory in which our social and political desires can appear, however fleetingly. Historical materials (images, sounds, and printed language) become a point of departure for making present what cannot be grasped by representations of history (narratives, archives): the emergence of events and situations, which can only become known retroactively. Recent live art has rarely been more conscious of its origins in civil disobedience and the civil rights movement, where we view the body as a site of social antagonism, and as a “case” for struggles for recognition and justice. With Pendleton’s work, even though we are often left with aporias and blind spots, we feel the force of historical matter self-organizing and finding form beyond representability and essence. We discover the protest of the object—works of art and performance resisting their subsumption by common epistemological frameworks and modes of narration posing as truth."

T. Donovan, 'Adam Pendleton‘, in BOMB Magazine, 2011

Image: Untitled (After Julius Eastman), 2019, silkscreen ink and spray paint on canvas, 91.4 x 71.1 cm.; 36 x 28 in.

Selected Works

Black Dada (LK/LC/AA), 2008–2009

Untitled (IF THE), 2018

Untitled (After Julius Eastman), 2019
View All

Solo Exhibitions

ADAM PENDLETON - Galerie Max Hetzler

Who We Are

Bleibtreustraße 45, Berlin

25 April – 29 June 2019
ADAM PENDLETON - Galerie Max Hetzler

Who We Are

Goethestraße 2/3, Berlin

25 April – 29 June 2019

Selected Institutional Exhibitions

Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton

Consortium Museum, Dijon

13 March – 18 October 2020
Adam Pendleton

Elements of Me

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

13 February – 15 November 2020
ADAM PENDLETON

what a day was this

Lever House, New York

8 March – 28 August 2018
ADAM PENDLETON

ADAM PENDLETON

Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore

26 March – 1 October 2017
ADAM PENDLETON

shot him in the face

KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin

24 February – 14 May 2017

Biography

Show Vita
Show Selected Bibliography

Videos

Adam Pendleton

Artist Talk: Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton in conversation with Ruti Direktor, curator at Tel Aviv Museum of Art

7 June 2020
Adam Pendleton

Interview: Adam Pendleton

filmed on the occasion of his solo exhibition "Who We Are" at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

Bleibtreustraße 45, Berlin

17 September 2019

Publications

Adam Pendleton: Who We Are - Galerie Max Hetzler

Adam Pendleton: Who We Are

Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London, Berlin 2019
With texts by Omar Berrada

€ 50.00

Adam Pendleton, Who We Are - Galerie Max Hetzler

Adam Pendleton, Who We Are

Exhibition Poster
2019

€ 20.00

Adam Pendleton, Who We Are - Galerie Max Hetzler

Adam Pendleton, Who We Are

Exhibition Poster
2019

€ 20.00

Selected Press

ARTnews June 2020

Der Tagesspiegel June 2019

The New York Times May 2018

WSJ Magazine March 2018

The Brooklyn Rail September 2016

Art in America January 2015

The New York Observer April 2012

Artforum November 2011

BOMB Magazine November 2010

The New York Times May 2010

News

Adam Pendleton et al.

To Be Determined (group show)
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas
27 September – 27 December 2020

To Be Determined juxtaposes works from many centuries, geographies, and cultures to trace how the significance of art can shift when presented in new contexts. Drawn from the DMA’s global collection, the exhibition features works of art, sacred objects, and design from the 13th century to the ...
Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton – Signed Edition (publication)

The first encompassing publication on the work of the groundbreaking American artist Adam Pendleton, published by Phaidon, is now available for pre-order.

Adam Pendleton's original and powerful body of work has been described as the embodiment of a new era. His multifaceted projects, which ...
Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton et al.

Yesterday's Tomorrow: Selections from the Rose Collection, 1933 – 2018 (group show)
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham
7 February – 20 November 2020

Despite language used to describe it, the past is rarely stilled within the fixed frame of retrospective distance. Instead, defying attempts at neat chronology, the past resurfaces and evolves in the expanding now. Images and narratives echo at the edges of the present and shade visions of the ...
Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton et al.

Mapping the Collection (group show)
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
20 June – 11 October 2020

The ex­hi­bi­tion Map­ping the Col­lec­tion takes a new look at two in­flu­en­tial de­cades in Amer­i­can (art) his­to­ry: the 1960s and 1970s. The ex­hi­bi­tion pre­sents a se­lec­tion of art­works from the Mu­se­um Lud­wig’s col­lec­tion by fe­male, queer, and in­dige­nous artists as well as ...
Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton

Consortium Museum, Dijon (solo show)
13 March – 18 October 2020

Adam Pendleton is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist whose work includes installation, performance, video, and text. He recontextualizes various art historical movements, from Dada to Minimalism to contemporary ballet and literature, combining them with elements highlighting historical figures ...
Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton

Elements of Me (solo show)
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
13 February – 15 November 2020

Adam Pendleton’s exhibition considers the relations between (geometric) abstraction, blackness, and languages of collectivity. Three basic shapes—square, triangle, and circle—are the refrains in this room-sized installation.

Pendleton is a New York-based artist known for work animated by what ...
Adam Pendleton

Urs Fischer, Adam Pendleton et al.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (group show)
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv
17 December 2019 – 26 December 2020

Mirosłav Bałka – Jean-Michel Basquiat – Max Ernst – Urs Fischer – 
Rashid Johnson – Michael Joo – Adam McEwen – Adam Pendleton 
– Ugo Rondinone – Henry Taylor

This small-scale group exhibition borrows its name from the title of Italo Calvino’s novel, published in 1979, towards the end of the ...
Urs Fischer, Adam Pendleton