Rainer, in the form of an unscripted conversation about
movement (both physical and political) at a New York
City diner. There are also large-scale paintings from a
project entitled A Victim of American Democracy, inspired
by a speech from civil rights leader Malcolm X. For
these, Pendleton uses spray paint to produce long linear
strokes on canvas before silkscreening language-based
collages on top. It’s a physically demanding exercise in
mark-making, somewhat like a performance. ‘There’s
something about the immediacy of spray paint just
coming out of the can; it’s so matter of fact,’ he explains
as we look around his painting studio down the hall
from his main space, populated with monumental
canvases that have just gained their stripes.
Beyond sharp visual impressions, Pendleton hopes
that by having different bodies of work side by side,
viewers will discover relationships between different
elements, and how they speak to and influence each
other. So the entire show can be seen as one abstract
work. ‘I’m creating as capacious a visual or theoretical
space as I can, where you get lost, but at the same time
there is something familiar about the experience. It
gives you enough to hold onto, then kind of slips away.’
Coinciding with the show opening, Pendleton
has also curated the Pace booth at Frieze Masters.
‘I didn’t want the show to be hermetic. I wanted the
opportunity to think about my work in relation to
other historical movements and moments and artists,’
he says. Thus the inclusion of works by LeWitt,
unsurprisingly, as well as Robert Ryman, Alfred Jensen
and Howardena Pindell. The booth uses 20th century
works as a vehicle for enduring ideas, the same way
Black Dada Reader draws on influential historical
writings to animate Pendleton’s own vision, ‘to talk
about the future while talking about the past’. ∂
‘Adam Pendleton: Our Ideas’ will be showing at Pace Gallery,
6 Burlington Gardens, London W1, 2 October–9 November,
pacegallery.com; adampendleton.netLike Black Dada Reader, Pendleton’s artwork is an
exercise in radical juxtapositions, borrowing and
collating language and visuals into something more
sublime. In his System of Display series, for instance,
more than a decade in the making, he silkscreens
a borrowed image onto a square mirror and places
a sheet of glass with a letter three inches above,
so that they are simultaneously apart and together.
‘I think whenever language is present, we start to
wonder what it means. These works function on a
visual level, divorced from meaning but also pregnant
with meaning at the same time.’ It’s the same with
his Black Dada paintings, monumental canvases with
individual letters from the phrase ‘Black Dada’ (in
a bold Arial typeface) overlaid on cropped and enlarged
reproductions of LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cube.
It’s abstraction and language rubbed together,
transmitting ‘something fundamental, guttural
about the human experience’, offers Glimcher.
Titled ‘Our Ideas’, the upcoming show at Pace has
works from both series, in addition to a grid of about
70 silkscreen-on-mylar works that draw more heavily
on Pendleton’s own drawings (photocopied, collaged
with found materials and written over), and a video
portrait of the octogenarian choreographer YvonneLEFT, PENDLETON’S OK DADA
OK BLACK DADA OK (WE ARE),
2018, SILKSCREEN INK AND
SPRAY PAINT ON CANVAS
BELOW, A SCALE MODEL OF
THE NEW SHOW, FEATURING,
FROM LEFT, MIDNIGHT, 2017,
A SERIES OF SILKSCREEN ON
MYLAR WORKS, AND A VIDEO
PORTRAIT OF YVONNE RAINERArt
144 ∑