Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting @ Philadelphia Art Museum

Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting

Philadelphia Art Museum 

Through November 16, 2025 

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984)

Untitled (Who is Queen), 2020 

Enamel screenprint and graphite pigment 

Sheet: 64 × 49 inches (162.6 × 124.5 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 105-2024-19 

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984)

Untitled (Figure and Malcolm X), 2020

Enamel screenprint and graphite pigment 

Sheet: 64 × 49 inches (162.6 × 124.5 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 105-2024-20

Chuck Close 

Self Portrait, 2017 

Screenprint in ninety-one colors 

Sheet: 69 × 57  3/4 inches (175.3 × 146.7 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x21994(10)

The Philadelphia Art Museum presents Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting, the first exhibition to spotlight four decades of collaborations between the Brand X printmaking workshop and a diverse roster of contemporary artists. On view through November 16, 2025, the exhibition features more than 80 screenprints by Helen Frankenthaler, Rashid Johnson, Alex Katz, Tschabalala Self, and Mickalene Thomas, among many others.

The exhibition celebrates the transformative gift of the Brand X Editions Archive to the Philadelphia Art Museum, presenting a selection from the over 400 screenprints given by master printer and founder Robert Blanton. Since establishing the workshop in 1979, Blanton and his team of skilled printers, chromists, and specialists have worked in collaboration with an impressive list of artists to push screenprinting techniques to meet the artists’ varied styles and expressive ambitions. The body of work from Brooklyn-based Brand X builds significantly on the museum’s extensive holdings of historical screenprints, adding major contemporary examples of traditional and experimental techniques. The Philadelphia Art Museum now holds one of the most comprehensive collections of screenprints along with essential archives related to the medium’s history and evolution from commercial tool to vibrant fine-art technique.

Emmanuel Taku

Entanglement, 2022 

Screenprint, printed in twenty-three colors 

with  collage elements 

Sheet: 60 × 40 1/4 inches  (152.4 × 102.2 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, 2023- 191-32

Emmanuel Taku

Got You, 2022 

Screenprint, printed in twenty-seven colors 

with  collage elements 

Sheet: 60 × 40 1/4 inches  (152.4 × 102.2 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, 2023- 191-33

“It is an honor to be the chosen home for Brand X’s magnificent collection of prints, said Sasha Suda, the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Art Museum. “As expert printmakers, internationally renowned for their craft, Brand X are the true leaders in this field. For a museum like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with such a rich and dedicated history in printmaking, it is a privilege for us to have this opportunity to welcome our visitors to experience and enjoy this generous gift.”

Deborah Kass

OY/YO, 2011 

Two screenprints, printed in three colors on  paper board 

Framed: 21 1/2 × 20 inches (54.6 × 50.8 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x22034a,b

Deborah Kass (b. 1952)

Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner, 2022 

Silkscreen, printed in seven colors on Coventry Rag paper 

Sheet: 57 × 57 inches (144.8 × 144.8 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023-191-4

On view throughout the galleries are the results of Brand X’s dynamic collaborations across four decades of work. Together, the prints reveal the remarkable versatility of screenprinting. In the first gallery, for instance, works by Rashid Johnson, Deborah Kass, Adam Pendleton, and Mickalene Thomas demonstrate the medium’s ability to mimic the richness of paint layers, render a photographic precision, and produce variegated textures and surfaces. These artists expand the technical boundaries of screenprint in their exploration of themes relating to belonging, memory, and self-definition. From the dense, painterly urgency of Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Anxious Red to the layered intricacy of Mickalene Thomas’s November 1977, each work here shows how, at the Brand X workshop, screenprinting can be stretched, challenged, and transformed in response to an artist’s creative impulses.

Troy Michie 

Doubling, 2019 

Screenprint, Framed: 40 × 30 inches (101.6 × 76.2 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x22005(6)

Emily Mae Smith 

Poetry (Toy in Blood), 2022 

Screenprint, printed in forty-seven colors 

Sheet:  60 × 45 1/2 inches (152.4 × 115.6 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2024, 105- 2024-30(11)

The exhibition also addresses themes relating to text and language, pattern and decoration, graphic illusion, and landscape and figuration. Eight progressive proofs of Vija Celmins’s Ocean Surface offer a rare view onto the screenprinting process. From print to print, visitors can see how the image was formed cumulatively—by the sequential printing of individual screens, each bearing a single layer of ink. In final form, Celmins’s image materializes through sixteen applications of nuanced grays—an additive and subtle process apt for rendering the depth and detail of the ocean. Throughout the exhibition, equal emphasis is given to the pictorial and the material. Brand X Editions shines light on the technical procedures and the many roles—beyond that of the artist—that are vital to the production of screenprints.

“Just like the work that happens at Brand X, this exhibition and its catalogue were thoroughly collaborative endeavors, said Louis Marchesano, curator of the exhibition and the Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and Conservation. “The addition of the Brand X Editions Archive, which will continue to grow as the studio produces more editions, goes a long way toward building an authoritative resource on screenprinting at the museum.”

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990)

Homebodies – All American 1, 2022

Monoprint, fabric collage, pigment wash, 

hand coloring, and enamel silkscreen 

Sheet (each): 24 × 18 inches (61 × 45.7 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023-191-29a,b

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990)

Homebodies – All American 1, 2022

Monoprint, fabric collage, pigment wash, 

hand coloring, and enamel silkscreen 

Sheet (each): 24 × 18 inches (61 × 45.7 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023-191-29a,b

Rashid Johnson 

Seascape, 2023 

Screenprint, printed in nine colors, with hand, 

applied navy acrylic mixture 

Gift of Brand X  Editions, New York, 2023, 105-2024-9

Rashid Johnson 

Untitled Large Mosaic, 2025

Screenprint, framed: 61 X 105 inches (1 154.9x 266.7 cm)

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x 22005(5)

Extending the exhibition beyond the gallery space, Rashid Johnson’s Untitled (Large Mosaic), 2025, is displayed in the museum’s Forum Balcony. For over three years, Rashid Johnson and his collaborators at Brand X developed this spectacular 293-color print, combining traditional screenprinting techniques—visible in the flat passages of bold color—with unconventional materials, including wood veneer, mirrored mylar, and cast paper oyster shells. Inspired by Johnson’s low-relief wall mosaics composed of innumerable tile fragments and other bits of material, this project captures Brand X’s enduring commitment to pursuing new levels of technical innovation and experimentation.

Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue featuring essays by Philadelphia Art Museum curators and paper conservators, an interview with Robert Blanton and David DeSanctis of Brand X, a technical glossary related to the history and technique of screenprint, and an inventory of the archive held by Philadelphia Art Museum.

The exhibition is curated by Louis Marchesano, the Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Deputy Director of Cultural Affairs and Conservation, with Em Dombrovskaya, the Suzanne Andrée Curatorial Fellow; Laurel Garber, the Park Family Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings; and Emily Friedman, the Allen and Kelli Questrom Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Dallas Museum of Art.

A series of exhibitions by Brand X collaborators including Rashid Johnson and Joel Mesler will be shown at the Philadelphia Art Museum through 2028.

PHILADELPHIA ART MUSEUM 

Morgan, Korman, and Field Galleries

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130

www.visitpham.org

Adam Pendleton @ Pace Gallery, Berlin - "spray light layer emerge" Exhibition

Adam Pendleton

spray light layer emerge

Pace Gallery, Berlin

September 11 - November 2, 2025

Adam Pendleton

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. 

Adam Pendleton: An Abstraction

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

www.pacegallery.com

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Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC

April 4, 2025 - January 3, 2027

Adam Pendleton: An Abstraction 

Pace Gallery, New York, May 3 – August 16, 2024

David Adjaye / Adam Pendleton

Pace Gallery, Hong Kong, May 18 – Junu 30, 2021

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen @ Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC - A Landmark Exhibition

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Through January 3, 2027 

Portrait of Adam Pendleton

© Adam Pendleton. Photo: Matthew Septimus 

Adam Pendleton 

WE ARE NOT (Composition), 2024 

Silkscreen ink and black gesso on canvas 

19 x 15 in. (43.3 x 38.1 cm) 

© Adam Pendleton. Photo: Andy Romer

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presents “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen,” a landmark exhibition by Adam Pendleton. The artist presents new and recent paintings as well as a single-channel video work. Pendleton’s first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, highlights his unique contributions to contemporary American painting while making use of the architecture of the Museum and the history of the National Mall.

“Introducing Adam Pendleton’s recent work in our 50th year is intentional,” said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. “His exhibition reflects the Hirshhorn’s mission as a 21st-century art museum that amplifies the voices of artists responding to history and place in real time. ‘Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen’ invites our almost one million annual visitors to think about the complexities of abstraction within the American experience, and its potential to forge associations among our shared past, present and future.”

“I am delighted to exhibit my work on the occasion of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary,” said Adam Pendleton. “It presents a meaningful opportunity to engage, in subtle and poetic ways, with the Museum’s architecture, position on the National Mall and legacy of showing significant abstract and conceptual work.”

Adam Pendleton is known for his visually distinct and conceptually rigorous paintings that he begins on paper with drips, splatters, sprays, geometric shapes, words and phrases, and inky fragments reminiscent of broken letters. These visual experiments are at times carefully controlled and at others freely improvised. He photographs these initial compositions and then layers them using a screen-printing process, purposefully blurring the distinctions between the act of painting, the act of drawing and the act of photography.

“Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” features Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada,” “Days,” “WE ARE NOT,” and new “Composition” and “Movement” paintings. An encounter with any of these works, typically composed of two colors on black-gessoed grounds, brings forth the immediacy of gestural abstraction, the considered execution of minimal and conceptual art, and the playfulness of concrete poetry. “Painting is as much an act of performance as it is an act of translation and transformation,” the artist has stated.

The artist also debuts “Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?),” a new video work that is projected floor to ceiling. The work makes use of still and moving images of Resurrection City, the multiday encampment erected on the National Mall in the spring and summer of 1968, which is considered to be the culmination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. Strobing in and out of darkness, the documentary material is interspersed with found footage and punctuated by flashes of geometric forms, dissolving the boundaries between abstraction and representation. The film’s score, by multi-instrumentalist composer Hahn Rowe, integrates a reading by the late poet and cultural critic Amiri Baraka with an orchestration of brass, woodwinds and drums.

In its totality, “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” offers a powerful counterpoint to the Museum’s collection surveys that are concurrently presented in adjacent galleries. The exhibition is organized by Evelyn C. Hankins, the Hirshhorn’s head curator, with support from former curatorial assistant Alice Phan. “It is an honor to invite Adam Pendleton to respond to the Hirshhorn’s singular architecture and location,” said Hankins. “‘Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen’ speaks to the vision of our anniversary—a period of simultaneous reflection and forward thinking, a space in which Pendleton has been operating for almost two decades.”

“Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with scholarly essays, Studio Hirshhorn and Hirshhorn Eye videos, and free public programs.

Artist Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is a central figure among a cross-generational group of painters redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His work has been shown at major museums around the world. Recent solo and group exhibitions include “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, Missouri (2023–2024); “Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (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 (2021–2022).

Pendleton’s work is part of numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; and Tate London.

HIRSHHORN MUSEUM

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Independence Ave SW and 7th St SW, Washington, DC 20560

hirshhorn.si.edu

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC

April 4, 2025 - January 3, 2027

Artist Adam Pendleton @ Pace Gallery, New York - "An Abstraction" Exhibition

Adam Pendleton: An Abstraction 

Pace Gallery, New York 

May 3 – August 16, 2024 

Adam Pendleton 

Black Dada (A), 2023

© Adam Pendleton, courtesy Pace Gallery 

Pace presents An Abstraction, an exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by New York-based artist Adam Pendleton, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York.

Adam Pendleton’s first solo show at Pace’s New York gallery in ten years, An Abstraction follows a series of significant solo exhibitions by the artist at museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2021; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2022; and mumok - Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna in 2023. The return to his home city marks a continuation of his career-long project of creating spaces of engagement and “fighting for the right to exist in and through abstraction.”

Adam Pendleton’s work indexes and documents the physical process of painting to create layered pictorial fields that—in their painterly, psychic, and verbal expressions—announce a new mode of visual composition for the 21st century. He is guided by a visual and structural philosophy he has termed “Black Dada,” an ongoing inquiry into Blackness and its relationship to abstraction and conceptions of the avant-garde. Investigating Blackness as a color and theoretical proposition, the artist’s work reflects a contrapuntal understanding of the world in both sensorial and conceptual terms.

In An Abstraction, the artist’s 12 paintings and 13 drawings hang within a monumental, site-specific architecture consisting of five black triangular forms. These sculptural walls reorders the gallery into new, unexpected spaces and extend the visual language of the exhibited works.

Bringing together the artist’s Black Dada and Untitled (Days) bodies of work, the new paintings and drawings in the exhibition feature a variety of marks—spray painting, stenciled geometric forms, and expressionistic brushstrokes—to blur distinctions between painting, drawing, and photography and propose painting as a documentary and performative act.

Adam Pendleton’s new Black Dada works imbue his iconic black and white compositions with focused and saturated colors. Each of the paintings and drawings in this body of work bears one or more typographic letters from the phrase “BLACK DADA,” rendered in a sans serif font amid the artist’s gestural marks. Continually transposing and overwriting these two modes of inscription, Pendleton cultivates a living library of his own ever-evolving gestures and processes.

Paintings and drawings from Adam Pendleton’s Untitled (Days) body of work will also be featured in An Abstraction. Using collagist strategies of indexing, daily mark-making, fragmentation, and recombination, these works create a cumulative portrait of the artist’s experimentations in the studio.

In spring 2025, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. will present Love, Queen, a landmark exhibition of Pendleton’s work that will anchor the institution’s 50th anniversary year.

ADAM PENDLETON

Born in Richmond, Virginia in 1984, Adam Pendleton completed the Artspace Independent Study Program in Pietrasanta, Italy, in 2002. His work has been featured at major museums around the world, including solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, among others. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Adam Pendleton: Who is Queen? (2021–22) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together (2021–22) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Biennial: Quiet as It’s Kept (2022) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White and Light (2023–24) at the mumok - Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; and Adam Pendleton: To Divide By (September 22, 2023 – January 15, 2024) at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis.

His work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and Tate, London.

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, NYC

www.pacegallery.com

David Adjaye / Adam Pendleton @ Pace Gallery, Hong Kong

David Adjaye / Adam Pendleton 

Pace Gallery, Hong Kong 

May 18 – June 30, 2021 

DAVID ADJAYE  

Khufu, 2021 

© David Adjaye, courtesy Pace Gallery 

ADAM PENDLETON 

Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2020 

© Adam Pendleton, courtesy Pace Gallery 

Pace Gallery presents the first ever two-person exhibition between internationally renowned American artist Adam Pendleton and Sir David Adjaye OBE, Ghanaian-British artist and world-leading architect. The exhibition features a new body of paintings entitled Untitled (WE ARE NOT), presented in visual and spatial dialogue with a set of sculptural works by David Adjaye. Viewed in concert, the works articulate a shared visual lexicon that explores questions of language, identity, and monumentality. 

The two artists first met in 2016 while Pendleton was installing a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, a building designed by David Adjaye. In the years that followed, their continued dialogue revealed a mutual interest in the politics of space and representation, as well as the relationship between art and architecture. The exhibition at Pace in Hong Kong will be the first time their independent endeavors have been presented in dialogue with one another.

Through a sustained and multifaceted engagement with painting, Adam Pendleton’s work explores the tensions between language, representation, and abstraction. The paintings enunciate three simple words, “we,” “are,” and “not,” which nevertheless form a complex matrix of meanings, constructing what Pendleton refers to as a series of “incomplete postulates.” He explains that the paintings, “like the voices of a multitude, do not accede to an identity. In their combinatorial repetition, they instead unfold a multiplicity: not-beings, not-nots, and being-nots.” Made up of multiple layers of spray paint, sharply defined brush marks, collage, and photographs, the Untitled (WE ARE NOT) paintings reveal a process of metamorphosis that refuses to speak itself into a final form, preferring to remain in a state of indeterminacy. As if capturing the process of predication, Adam Pendleton’s paintings generate open questions: Who or what is this we? Who or what is this not-we? What are we not? Are we whatnot? Who or what is not?

Originating from Adam Pendleton’s seminal Black Dada text of 2008, the phrase “WE ARE NOT” is broken down and merged to form all-over compositions. Adam Pendleton’s reiteration and reconfiguration of his own past language extends the dynamics of his ongoing Black Dada project, a conceptual framework through which the artist explores ideas about the future through the evocation of the past, with an emphasis on the relationship between blackness and the avant-garde. The Untitled (WE ARE NOT) paintings similarly address questions of historical and collective definition, alluding obliquely to the rhetoric of contemporary identity politics. Pendleton uses the repetition of such words to produce a kind of combinatorial patterning; what starts as “WE ARE NOT” quickly dissolves into “NOT NOT WE” and “NOT ARE WE.” These permutations, hovering on the edge of signification and meaninglessness, encode the often ambiguous, arbitrary, and fictitious logics at the heart of identity, which is often taken as self-evident.

David Adjaye’s modular geometric sculptures take the form of pyramids, yet are composed of individual elements with the capacity to be reconfigured in a variety of orientations. In this way, they echo the combinatorial possibilities of language explored in Adam Pendleton’s paintings. Working in marble—which is also among the most frequently used materials in the history of architecture—has enabled David Adjaye to distill broader ideas about materiality and form into objects that trouble the boundaries between art and architecture, while evoking the history of minimal sculpture.

In David Adjaye’s marble pyramids, there exists another kind of layering: the way in which their surfaces register the passage of geologic time. The material of marble is formed through the long history of geologic compression, in which minerals recrystallize to form streaks and veins. These marks on the body of the stone become a kind of writing, echoing the lexical logic of Adam Pendleton’s compositions in a radically different time scale. That David Adjaye’s sculptures appear static and immovable in their heavy solidity belies the fact that each of the four constituent parts can be reconfigured to produce multiple variations, giving them a sense of dynamism and play that is itself semantic in nature. In referring to the ancient form of the Egyptian pyramid—a form that encodes an entire cultural history of technological innovation and ancient African knowledge systems—these sculptures both extend and depart from David Adjaye’s broader architectural practice, in which he examines relationships formal and cultural meaning, between the canons of Classicism and the vernacular traditions of non-Western cultures.

This exhibition comes at an important juncture in both artists’ careers. This fall, Pendleton will present Who Is Queen?, a major solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Meanwhile Pendleton recently unveiled his site-specific installation, As Heavy as Sculpture, in the lobby of the New Museum in New York, which was created for the landmark exhibition Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, originally conceived by the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor.

Since the beginning of his career, David Adjaye’s architectural practice has been informed by his interest in contemporary art. Adjaye has collaborated with visual artists in the past, including Chris Ofili with whom he created The Upper Room, a room size installation permanently on view at Tate Britain as well as Kapwani Kiwanga, with whom he created Sankofa Pavilion, a glass structure used as a space for conversation, shown as part of Whitechapel Gallery’s Is This Tomorrow? exhibition in 2019. Alongside his numerous architectural projects, David Adjaye led the design of the Ghana Freedom Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, the country’s first pavilion in the Artigliere of the historic Arsenale. Among his current projects are a new design for the Edo Museum of West African Art (EMOWAA) in Benin, Nigeria, the long-awaited new home for the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Abrahamic Family House, an interfaith complex in Abu Dhabi.

ADAM PENDLETON (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia), lives and works in New York. Adam Pendleton’s recent solo exhibitions include: Le Consortium, Dijon (2020); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2020); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2018); Baltimore Museum of Art (2017); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017); Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2016); and Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (2016). Adam Pendleton’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Tate, London, among many other institutions.

Sir DAVID ADJAYE OBE is a Ghanaian-British architect who has received international acclaim for his impact on the field. In 2000, he founded Adjaye Associates, which today operates globally, with studios in Accra, London, and New York and projects spanning across the globe. David Adjaye’s largest project to date, The National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, DC opened on the National Mall in Washington DC in 2016 and was named Cultural Event of the Year by The New York Times. In 2017, David Adjaye was recognized as one of the 100 most influential people of the year by TIME Magazine. Most recently, David Adjaye was announced the winner of the 2021 RIBA Royal Gold Medal. Approved personally by Her Majesty the Queen, the Royal Gold Medal is considered one of the highest honors in British architecture for significant contribution to the field internationally. Sir David Adjaye is also the recipient of the World Economic Forum’s 27th Annual Crystal Award, which recognizes his “leadership in serving communities, cities and the environment.”

PACE GALLERY HONG KONG

12/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong

www.pacegallery.com