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<\/p>\n\n\tAdam Pendleton wants you to notice everything \u2014 and ponder without the need for resolve. His polyphonic paintings, made of marks unconfined by canvas or concept, almost demand of it. There is always more to see.<\/p>\n
In his new monograph \u201cLove, Queen,\u201d Pendleton invites you to experience his work with an intimacy previously unseen.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m curious about how paintings or drawings articulate themselves. How we come to approach them and how we come to understand them,\u201d the artist says. \u201cBut even that word \u2018understand,\u2019 I think, is very loaded in this sense, because understand \u2018what,\u2019 right? What is there to understand? And I think that\u2019s one of the things this book throws into question. When you do start to make these relationships, what are you \u2018understanding\u2019? What kind of knowledge or sense of being or construction or making is emerging?\u201d<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tAdam Pendleton<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Photo<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cLove, Queen\u201d documents his exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, which opened in April 2025 and runs through January 2027. The book is currently available at the museum and will be online in December.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe goal with this publication was to capture the essence of making as it relates to my paintings and drawings,\u201d Pendleton says. \u201cIf you were to flip through this publication almost on a psychic level, you would end up understanding, if not maybe perhaps not definitively, but spiritually, what goes into the making of my work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most well-known for his \u201cBlack Dada\u201d aesthetic and conceptual framework, Pendleton has long been inspired by his post-WWI Dada predecessors who responded to the absurdity of modernity through illogical and unprecedented artistic interventions. He\u2019s succeeding the era-defining avant-garde with an expansion of what it means to \u201crefuse.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBlack Dada as a concept, as an idea, has been influential to my work for almost 20 years now,\u201d Pendleton says. \u201cI realized that it\u2019s really an operating position. It allows me to be \u2018bad,\u2019 for lack of a better word, as an artist, and playful and embrace a sense of chaos and a particular sense of freedom as it relates to abstraction, to language, and as it relates to the general contours of \u2018being\u2019 \u2014 both as an individual, as a citizen, but I think ultimately as an artist.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tAdam Pendleton\u2019s \u201cLove, Queen\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tElisabeth Bernstein\/Courtesy of Adam Pendleton<\/p>\n