U.S. Painter Adam Pendleton Brings His ‘Black Dada’ Journey to Mennour
The polymathic artist’s ‘distinct and conceptually rigorous paintings’ explore the relationship between Blackness and abstraction. Save to My Ocula
American artist Adam Pendleton has joined Parisian gallery Mennour.
Best known for his ‘Black Dada’ series, investigating the relationship between Blackness and aesthetics, Mennour said the Richmond-born artist is ‘a central figure among a crossgenerational group of painters’.
The gallery said ‘his visually distinct and conceptually rigorous paintings’ have ‘redefined the medium’ in terms of process and abstraction.
Pendleton started the ‘Black Dada’ works in 2008, beginning with a manifesto citing Black thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) to ‘problematise the relationship between conceptual art and civil rights’.
One such work, Black Dada (LK/LC/AA) (2008–2009), featuring letters from the word ‘black’ against a dark ground, has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Pendleton’s paintings, which start on paper with expressive drips, marks, or phrases, and then photographed and layered using a screenprinting process, manifest the artist’s belief in painting as a powerful ‘visual and conceptual force’, according to the gallery.
Mennour will show a recent painting by the artist at Art Basel’s flagship fair this June, and has scheduled a solo exhibition this autumn in Paris.
The list of galleries Pendleton has joined includes Pace Gallery in 2012, Galerie Eva Presenhuber in 2016, Max Hetzler in Berlin in 2018, and David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles in 2020.
Pendleton has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada (both 2022); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021).
The artist’s exhibition, Love, Queen, is set to debut at Washington D.C.‘s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden next month. —[O]
Main image: Adam Pendleton. Photo: Matthew Septimus.
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