Adam Pendleton | Artists

Adam Pendleton, a central figure in contemporary American painting, has redefined the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. Upending linear compositional logic, Pendleton’s paintings are created by a distilled layering of gesture, fragment, and form that mirrors the cacophony of contemporary experience. Each painting comes to life through its expressionistic flourishes, stark contrasts, and subtle uses of material, tone, and finish, as well as a precision reminiscent of minimal and conceptual art. Generative and poetic, his paintings create fluid and essential spaces for seeing, thinking, and feeling.

Pendleton’s painting process begins on paper by exploring the full breadth of mark-making. He layers paint, spray paint, ink, and watercolor, while integrating fragmentary text and geometric forms, often using stenciling techniques. These works on paper are photographed and then combined through a screen-printing process. Blurring distinctions between painting, drawing, and photography, the resulting paintings are a tangible manifestation of his belief in painting as a powerful “visual and conceptual force.”

In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (2025–2027); Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st- Century Art and Poetics at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2024–2025); Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White, and Light, at mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria (2023–2024); Adam Pendleton: To Divide By, at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2023–2024); Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2022); Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada (2022); and Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2021–2022).

Pendleton’s work is part of numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; and the Tate, London.

Solo show (selection)

2025

"Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen" , Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington

2024

"Adam Pendleton: An Abstraction", Pace Gallery, New York

"Adam Pendleton: These Gestures Towards You", Galerie Max Hetzler, London

2023

"Adam Pendleton: To Divide By", Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis

"Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White and Light", mumok, Wien

2022

"Adam Pendleton: Toy Soldier", Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Maag Areal, Zurich

"Adam Pendleton: In Abstraction", Pace Gallery, Geneva

"Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together", Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

2021

"Adam Pendleton: Paper", Pace Gallery, Palm Beach

"Adam Pendleton: Drawings", Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris

"Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?", Museum of Modern Art, New York

2020

"Adam Pendleton: Begin Again", David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

"Adam Pendleton", Le Consortium, Dijon

2019

"Adam Pendleton: These Elements of Me", Pace Gallery, Seoul

"Adam Pendleton: Who We Are", Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

2018

"Adam Pendleton: Our Ideas", Pace Gallery, London

"Adam Pendleton: New Works", Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon

"Adam Pendleton: what a day was this", Lever House, New York

"List Projects: Adam Pendleton", MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge

2017

"Adam Pendleton: Which We Can", Pace Gallery, Palo Alto

"Adam Pendleton: shot him in the face", Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

"Front Room: Adam Pendleton", Baltimore Museum of Art, MD

"Adam Pendleton: shot him in the face", KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin

2016

"Midnight in America", Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich

"Whole Fragments", Parra & Romero, Ibiza

"Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible", Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans

2015

"Adam Pendleton: New Work", Pace Gallery, London

2014

"Adam Pendleton: Selected Works", Travesía Cuatro, Guadalajara

"Adam Pendleton: Selected Works", Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago

"Adam Pendleton", Pace Gallery, New York

2013

"Adam Pendleton: Untitled (Fang Man from the Upper Ivindo Area, Northern Gabon, 1905-6/Furnishing Fabric, French or Italian, 1725-50)", Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

2012

"Adam Pendleton: I’ll Be Your", Pace Gallery, London

2011

"Adam Pendleton: New Black Dada Paintings", Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon

"Adam Pendleton: the women", Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago

"Adam Pendleton: Radio (ONE)", Salina Art Center, KS

2010

"Adam Pendleton: BAND, The Kitchen", New York

"Adam Pendleton", Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Alberta College of Art and Design, Calgary

"Adam Pendleton: chandelier across cognition generates glow linguistic signals perception", Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon

2009

"Adam Pendleton: EL T D K Amsterdam: Part III: BAND (film screening)", de Appel,
Amsterdam

"Adam Pendleton: EL T D K Amsterdam: Part II: grey-blue grain (exhibition)", Kunstverein, Amsterdam

"Adam Pendleton: EL T D K Amsterdam: Part I: three scenes (performance)", Kunstverein, Amsterdam

2008

"Adam Pendleton: Rendered in Black", Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, IN

2007

"Adam Pendleton: Rendered in Black and Rendered", Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

2005

"Adam Pendleton: History", Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles

"Deeper Down There", Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York

"Gorilla, My Love", Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

2004

"Being Here", Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana

"Being Here", Wallspace Gallery, New York