System of Display X (Next/A German Soldier and Transport Horses with Gasmask)

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.

System of Display X (Next/A German Soldier and Transport Horses with Gasmask), 2009-2013 is part of the System of Display series where Pendleton employs disparate references alongside fragmented representations of individual words drawn from an ongoing, associative list, in this case, a historical image of a German soldier from the First World War. Combining this material into silkscreened mirror and glass pieces Pendleton establishes, literally, a new system of display, severing visual materials from their historical context, while breaking with conventional hierarchies tied to the reading and interpretation of history.

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).