Adam Pendleton
spray light layer emerge
Pace Gallery, Berlin
September 11 - November 2, 2025
Black Dada (D), 2025
© Adam Pendleton, courtesy of Pace Gallery
Pace presents spray light layer emerge, an intimate selection of paintings and works on paper from Adam Pendleton’s Black Dada and Untitled (Days) bodies of work, presented across both floors of Die Tankstelle, the gallery’s new space in Berlin. The exhibition’s title, spray light layer emerge, reflects the various “acts” played out in the Black Dada paintings: materially, theoretically, poetically, and ultimately, visually.
A central figure in contemporary American painting, Adam Pendleton is known for continuously redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. His paintings begin 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 tangible manifestations of his belief in painting as a powerful “visual and conceptual force.”
Pendleton’s Black Dada paintings, shown on the first floor, are conceptually rich and subtly expressionistic: thought-acts suspended in mid-flight, the ghost of an urban scrawl, the impression of dispersed and diffused light. Composed as diptychs on black-gessoed grounds, they direct attention to the fundamental attributes of painting—surface, edge, figure, ground—and to the artist’s unique approach to compositional logic and visual thought. Each painting features one or two hard-edged letters from the phrase BLACK DADA, which function as a “figure” within each composition. BLACK DADA refers to Pendleton’s ongoing exploration of conceptions of Blackness and abstraction. These textual characters hang, rest, or hover within the visual field—where drips, sprays, splatters, and other gestures play against an invisible grid set by the symmetry of the diptychs. By foregrounding the modes and methods of composition, Pendleton’s Black Dada works invite viewers to engage with and question the formal, conceptual, and material possibilities of painting itself.
Adam Pendleton is currently the subject of a major exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen—his first solo exhibition in the city—runs from April 4, 2025, through January 3, 2027, and features new and recent paintings alongside a single-channel video. The exhibition highlights Pendleton’s singular contributions to contemporary American painting and engages with both the architecture of the museum and the historical context of the National Mall. In April 2026, Adam Pendleton will also present a solo exhibition at the Langen Foundation in Neuss, Germany.
This May, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced its acquisition of all 35 works from Pendleton’s Who Is Queen? exhibition (2021–2022). This landmark acquisition includes paintings and drawings from the Black Dada and WE ARE NOT bodies of work, as well as three video works: Notes on Resurrection City, Notes on the Robert E. Lee Monument, Richmond VA (figure), and So We Moved: A Portrait of Jack Halberstam.
Pace Publishing, 2025
Text by Marc Glimcher
Hardcover, 160 pages, 11 ¾ × 9 ½ in.
Image courtesy of Pace
Pace published Adam Pendleton: An Abstraction. Both a document and evolution of Pendleton’s first solo exhibition at Pace New York in a decade, the volume features a new text by Marc Glimcher.
PACE GALLERY BERLIN
Die Tankstelle, Bülowstrasse 18, 10783 Berlin
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April 4, 2025 - January 3, 2027
Pace Gallery, New York, May 3 – August 16, 2024
Pace Gallery, Hong Kong, May 18 – Junu 30, 2021
