Adam Pendleton (b. 1984), a central figure in contemporary American painting, continuously redefines the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. Upending linear compositional logic, Pendleton’s paintings are created by a distilled layering of gesture, fragment, and form that mirrors the cacophony of contemporary experience. Each painting comes to life through its expressionistic flourishes, stark contrasts, and subtle uses of material, tone, and finish, as well as a precision reminiscent of minimal and conceptual art. Generative and poetic, his paintings create fluid and essential spaces for seeing, thinking, and feeling. 

Pendleton’s painting process begins on paper by exploring the full breadth of markmaking. He layers paint, spray paint, ink, and watercolor, while integrating fragmentary text and geometric forms through stenciling techniques. These works on paper are photographed and subsequently combined using a screen printing process. Blurring distinctions among painting, drawing, and photography, the resulting paintings are a tangible manifestation of his belief in painting as a powerful “visual and conceptual force.” 

In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (2025–2027); Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st- Century Art and Poetics at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2024–2025); Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White, and Light, at mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria (2023–2024); Adam Pendleton: To Divide By, at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2023–2024); Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2022); Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada (2022); and Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2021–2022). 

Pendleton’s work is part of numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; and the Tate Modern, London.