Adam Pendleton’s work is a reflection of how we increasingly move through and experience the world on a sensorial level—a form of abstraction that, in its painterly, psychic, and verbal expression, announces a new mode of visual composition for the twenty-first century. It investigates Blackness as a color, an identity, a method, and a political subject—in short, as a multitude. His work also poses questions about the legacy of modernism in the present day, reactivating ideas from historic avant-gardes across mediums and moments in time. Since 2008 he has articulated much of his work through the frame of Black Dada, an evolving inquiry into the relationships between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. It’s a visual philosophy that confounds the distinctions between legibility and abstraction, past and present, familiar and strange, reminding us that meaning always develops through difference.
This philosophy extends to Pendleton’s solo exhibitions. He approaches each space not just as a container for his work, but as a literalization of it. His painted compositions inspire a structural intervention that physically implicates us, rearranging our perceptions and encouraging us to approach the work on our own terms. A similar phenomenon is at play in the works themselves. Each painting, drawing, sculpture, or film is a visual chorus of excited multiplicities. When these works come together in an exhibition, their polyphonic structure becomes both audible and visible.