ADAM PENDLETON

To Divide By (solo show)
Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis
22 September 2023 – 15 January 2024

Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2021–2022, © Adam Pendleton, photo: artist studio
Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2021–2022, © Adam Pendleton, photo: artist studio

Adam Pendleton’s solo exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will showcase a polyvocal assemblage of new and recent paintings, drawings, and video portraits that together reveal Pendleton’s interest in creating a conversation between mediums, as well as his belief in abstraction’s capacity to destabilise and disrupt. The artist’s work is driven by his evolving concept of ‘Black Dada’, which, in 2008, he described as a ‘way to talk about the future while talking about the past; it is our present moment.’ Seeking to consider multiple perspectives at once, Pendleton addresses the codes of representation and abstraction, the visual and literary uses of language, and the aesthetics of Blackness as an open-ended signifier.

Kemper Art Museum

Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2021–2022, © Adam Pendleton, photo: artist studio
Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2021–2022, © Adam Pendleton, photo: artist studio

Additional:

ADAM PENDLETON et al.

All that Lies Between | Drawing Triennial 2023 (group show)
The Norwegian Drawing Center, Oslo
13 October – 22 December 2023

 Adam Pendleton, Untitled (Who Is Queen), 2021, © Adam Pendleton, photo: Nicolas Brasseur
Adam Pendleton, Untitled (Who Is Queen), 2021, © Adam Pendleton, photo: Nicolas Brasseur

Adam Pendleton’s Untitled (Who Is Queen), 2021, will be included in the tenth edition of the Drawing Triennial. Presented at the Norwegian Drawing Center, Oslo, All that Lies Between aims to examine the relationship between the written and the drawn, the said and the unsaid, and everything in between. 

The Norwegian Drawing Center

 Adam Pendleton, Untitled (Who Is Queen), 2021, © Adam Pendleton, photo: Nicolas Brasseur
Adam Pendleton, Untitled (Who Is Queen), 2021, © Adam Pendleton, photo: Nicolas Brasseur

ADAM PENDLETON

Reading & Talk with Simone White (event)
Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis
13 October 2023, 5:30 pm

 Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2021 (detail), © Adam Pendleton, courtesy of the artist; Simone White, photo: Dana Scruggs
Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2021 (detail), © Adam Pendleton, courtesy of the artist; Simone White, photo: Dana Scruggs

Organised in conjunction with the exhibition Adam Pendleton: To Divide By at Kemper Art Museum, Adam Pendleton will be joined by Simone White for a reading and conversation on creative practice in relation to the role of language and poetry. 

Register here

 Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2021 (detail), © Adam Pendleton, courtesy of the artist; Simone White, photo: Dana Scruggs
Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2021 (detail), © Adam Pendleton, courtesy of the artist; Simone White, photo: Dana Scruggs

ALBERT OEHLEN, ADAM PENDLETON

Oehlen, Pendleton, Pope.L, Sillman (publication)
Published by Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London / Holzwarth Publications, 2023

Photo: def image
Photo: def image

The new catalogue published on the occasion of the group exhibition Oehlen, Pendleton, Pope.L, Sillman, on view at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin from 4 November 2021 until 29 January 2022, is now available for purchase. Alongside installation views and high-resolution images, the publication includes a conversation between Amy Sillman, Adam Pendleton, and Isabelle Graw.

Learn more

Photo: def image
Photo: def image

ADAM PENDLETON

Blackness, White, and Light (solo show)
Mumok, Vienna
31 March – 7 January 2024

Installation view: Blackness, White, and Light, mumok, Vienna, 2023, photo: Klaus Pichler, courtesy of © mumok
Installation view: Blackness, White, and Light, mumok, Vienna, 2023, photo: Klaus Pichler, courtesy of © mumok

Mumok will present a comprehensive solo exhibition of Adam Pendleton’s oeuvre, providing new insight into the artist’s paintings, drawings, and other works animated by what Pendleton calls ‘Black Dada’, a visual project and ever-evolving inquiry into the relationships between blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. The exhibition will present key bodies of work established over the past decade, as well as never before seen new ones. For the first time, Pendelton’s film portraits of artists and thinkers, including Ishmael in the Garden: A Portrait of Ishmael Houston-Jones, 2018, and So We Moved: A Portrait of Jack Halberstam, 2021, will be presented in sculptural, triangular video rooms, integrated directly into the primary space of the exhibition, allowing audiences to consider and absorb these moving-image works in relation to Pendleton’s wider artistic practice.

Mumok

Installation view: Blackness, White, and Light, mumok, Vienna, 2023, photo: Klaus Pichler, courtesy of © mumok
Installation view: Blackness, White, and Light, mumok, Vienna, 2023, photo: Klaus Pichler, courtesy of © mumok

ADAM PENDLETON

Who Is Queen? Vols. 1–5 (publication)
Published by DABA, New York
October 2022

Image: © Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin
Image: © Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin

Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo show Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2021–2022, the 5 volume book series Who Is Queen? adapts conversations between pairs of notable writers, theorists, philosophers, and musicians into contrapuntal texts. Transcripts of the original dialogues are intertwined with archival photographs and external texts.

DABA Press

Image: © Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin
Image: © Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin

ADAM PENDLETON

Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths: Revisiting the Black Dada Reader (publication)

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of “Black Dada.” Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents—an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze—formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls “radical juxtaposition.” In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist.

A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume, and sketching out new potential forms and vectors for Black Dada. Along with new source texts—from Toni Cade Bambara to Piet Mondrian to Clarice Lispector to Achille Mbembe—Pendleton has included conversations with some of the figures whose writing and work were featured in the earlier Reader: Thomas Hirschhorn, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Joan Jonas, Lorraine O’Grady, and Joan Retallack.

Get your copy here.