ADAM PENDLETON

Begin Again includes paintings from the ‘Untitled (WE ARE NOT)’ series, works on Mylar, and a video portrait, unfolding across three exhibition spaces in the gallery.

Pendleton’s montages, from painting to collage to video, engage in a kind of nonlinear iteration: never oriented toward any determinate position, they are constantly beginning and always resisting visual and semantic closure. This activity occurs at the level of language and syntax (the unfinished and unresolved statement) as well as at the level of artistic form (the suggestion that even finished works are still open to further transformation), thereby putting a stake in the experience of a continuous present. Drawing from a vast array of archives, he cycles through sets of sentences, fragments, images, artefacts, histories, and other propositions, developing what Gertrude Stein once discussed in Composition and Explanation (1926) as a ‘troubling time-sense.’ This mode of working does not redistribute or equilibrate time, but rather troubles it, generating a renewed form of history-telling, and participatory vision of both past and future.

In 2021, Adam Pendleton will present Who Is Queen, a major installation in the atrium of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Other recent solo exhibitions include shows at Le Consortium, Dijon (2020); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2020); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2018); Baltimore Museum of Art (2017); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017); Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2016); and Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Manifesto: Art x Agency, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2019); Public Movement: On Art, Politics and Dance, Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden (2017); The Eighth Climate (What does art do?), 11^th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2016); and Personne et les autres, Belgian Pavilion, 56^th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2015). Pendleton’s work is included in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Tate, London, among other institutions. Pendleton lives and works in New York.