Adam Pendleton is a New York-based artist whose artwork is on view at mumok in Vienna, Austria through September 03, 2023. This exhibition, entitled “Blackness, White, and Light“, presents the artist’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in Europe.
Since 2008, Adam Pendleton has been particularly interested in the idea of Black Dada, an investigation into the relationship between blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. This exhibition presents a selection of paintings, drawings, and other works that highlight a visual philosophy of incomplete assumptions, smoothing out distinctions between legibility and abstraction, past and present, the familiar and the strange.
On the first floor, the exhibition begins with a group of Black Dada paintings by Adam Pendleton. These diptychs are compositions of pictorial marks that document the evolving nature of the artist’s work. Each is complemented by one or more typographic letters of the phrase Black Dada, establishing a polyrhythmic space with its two modes of inscription: digital composition and painterly gesture.
On the second floor, three triangular pavilions have a double function. Their exterior walls support of Adam Pendleton‘s drawings and paintings, while their interiors serve as viewing rooms for his video works. Adjacent galleries also project videos by the artist.
Adam Pendleton developed the pavilions and angular sightlines of the main gallery in relation to the geometric formal elements of his paintings. The Untitled (Days) paintings integrate simple forms and visual materials from her daily studio practice into dense, expansive compositions. In the vast space of her Untitled paintings (WE ARE NOT), vibrational fields of text and gesture immerse the viewer in waves of collective enunciation.
The exhibition also features Code Poem ceramic sculptures, arrangements of geometric symbols that poet Hannah Weiner derived from Morse code in her 1982 book of the same name. Large Mylar grids on the surrounding walls feature painted marks printed on transparent film. In a second gallery on the same floor, Reflective Display System, a body of work he began in 2008, combines typography and pictorial incident with meticulous archival specificity while remaining speculative and open-ended.
New York-based artist Adam Pendleton‘s “Blackness, White, and Light” exhibition at the mumok in Vienna, Austria through September 03, 2023 is a must-see exhibition for contemporary art lovers and the curious. It offers a unique insight into the artist’s visual philosophy and his relationship to abstraction and the avant-garde.