ADAM PENDLETON

Artistic Practice and Approach

Pendleton is widely recognised as a central figure in contemporary American art and abstraction. His work is research-driven and conceptually focused, using appropriation, repetition, and fragmentation to build layered compositions that unsettle linear histories and dominant social narratives. Drawing on art history, literature, philosophy, political theory, and Black radical thought, he recontextualises archival material to question how images and texts shape collective memory.

Pendleton is decidedly a polymath who, in addition to making paintings, edits critical anthologies, makes films, and composes site-specific exhibitions and sculptural interventions.

Black Dada

A central concept in Pendleton’s work is Black Dada, a term and framework he has been developing since 2008. Black Dada operates as both a theoretical proposition and an aesthetic strategy, bringing together Blackness, abstraction, Dada, and the historical avant-garde. Through radical juxtapositions of images, language, and sound, Black Dada reimagines how past and future, representation and abstraction, are entangled.

Pendleton extends this framework beyond painting into books, critical anthologies, films, and site-specific installations, positioning Black Dada as an ongoing, open-ended project.

Notable Works and Series

Pendleton’s long term project Who Is Queen? project culminated in a large-scale installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2021–2022. The work transformed MoMA’s atrium with monumental scaffold-like structures that housed paintings, moving images, sculpture, and sound, creating an immersive environment that examined social, political, and cultural hierarchies.

Across his series, Pendleton frequently stages bold phrases, graphic forms, and gestural marks on large-scale canvases. In these works, language functions at once as statement, visual form, and obstruction, reflecting his interest in both communication and opacity.

His ongoing series ‘Untitled (WE ARE NOT)’ comprises large-scale paintings that incorporate spray-painted phrases, most notably ‘WE ARE NOT’, against geometric shapes and patterns. These works continue Pendleton’s exploration of language as a tool for both communication and obfuscation.

Recent Exhibitions and Achievements

Some of Pendleton’s recent exhibitions and achievements include:

• Can I Be?, Langen Foundation in Neuss, Germany (2026)
• Who Is Queen? at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021–2022)
• Elements of Me at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2019)
• Adam Pendleton at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2020–2021)

In 2024, he received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, further cementing his position in contemporary painting and conceptual art.

Collections

Pendleton’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Adam Pendleton FAQs

Ocula | 2026