Untitled (water small)

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia, USA,) is a New York-based artist whose work examines and questions the freedom of abstraction in relationship to language, politics, and identity. The animating force of his work is found in Black Dada—the artist’s term for a broad conceptualization of blackness. Working in various modes and mediums including painting, collage, video, and performance, the artist disrupts and reconsiders preconceived notions of history and culture.

Untitled (water small), 2014 is part of a series of works, where found and appropriated imagery is silkscreened up on a mirror surface severing visual materials from their historical context, in the same way as the letters in Pendleton’s work are released from their original meaning. Making Brackwasser Biarritz VIII, a work of Josef Albers from 1929 the point of departure of the work, the work is an example of how Pendleton recontextualizes elements of cultural history as a means of disrupting familiar narratives and offering alternative interpretations.

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984 in Richmond, VA) is an artist based in New York. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at such notable museums as mumok in Vienna (2023), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2021), Le Consortium in Dijon (2020), and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2017). His work has also been featured in the Whitney Biennial (2022), the Venice Biennale (2015), and other prominent group exhibitions, including Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum in New York (2021). Writing and publishing are central to Pendleton’s practice, and his many books include Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths (2021), Who Is Queen? A Reader (2021), Heavy as Sculpture (2021), and Black Dada Reader (2017).