Adam Pendleton has spent the higher a part of twenty years making artwork in a language solely he can communicate fluently, during which mark-making, pictographs, and quick, all-caps texts converge right into a type of abstraction that hovers someplace between early modernism, protest signage, and graffiti. Whereas it’s a language that isn’t wholly discernible at first, it’s price spending the time to learn to recognize it. Pendleton’s challenge is much less about delivering readability than it’s about encouraging shut inspection and deep introspection.
These efforts are on full view in his sprawling exhibition, “Love Queen,” on the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (by means of January 3, 2027). Looping by means of the museum’s inner-ring galleries like a liturgy, visible fragments echo all through the round room, constructing towards an aesthetic and emotional implosion the best way {that a} sequence of metaphors do in a parable. At instances, they really feel much less like work than blackboards at mid-lecture or fragments of a futuristic textual content.
Indebted to Conceptualism’s lengthy shadow, Pendleton emerged within the early 2000s at a second when portray felt as if it had been as soon as once more up for grabs. He selected to not resurrect it precisely, however to redirect it, treating the canvas as a stage for linguistic and cultural battle as an alternative. Artwork historic influences, from Franz Kline to Glenn Ligon, are filtered by means of Pendleton’s cool, regular logic. His course of begins with gestures in ink or watercolor on paper—drips, splatters, shapes—which might be then photographed, layered, and screen-printed onto giant black-gessoed grounds. Mixing references to signage and typography, poetry and Xerox artwork, his canvases, whereas not all the time fairly legible, are by no means silent.
The very best work within the present are extra natural, specifically the works from the “Untitled (Days)” sequence, begun in 2020. Excessive distinction, white on black, the markings repeat and construct right into a crescendo. The exhibition additionally contains Pendleton’s newest entries to his “Black Dada” sequence (2008–ongoing), representing a departure from his earlier principally black-and-white canvases. With swaths of garish gold and neon inexperienced reducing by means of the black, they’re bolder and louder than their predecessors in a means that feels considerably distant and chilly—perhaps even a bit alien. His inclusion of letters, one hidden per canvas, nevertheless, are equally as indecipherable as his earlier works. That’s till the sunshine hits the canvas excellent.
The present’s closing work, Resurrection Metropolis Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?), is a uncommon second of emotional readability. Projected flooring to ceiling, this single-channel video assembles documentation of the 1968 Poor Individuals’s Marketing campaign, the protest encampment that took over the Nationwide Mall within the months after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. However Pendleton treats the fabric right here much less as historic reality than a sequence of compiled recollections, infused with emotion and transmitted into the current. Triangles and circles flash throughout the display, generally obliterating faces, generally lending them an unintended halo. He zooms so carefully into topics they seem out of focus, which he then contrasts with a panoramic shot, giving the purpose view of an inquisitive bystander. Stitched collectively, a story slowly coalesces out of 1,000,000 interrupted photos.
Pendleton’s work might by no means absolutely resolve for his viewers. Its meanings shift relying on the place you stand, how lengthy you keep, what you’re keen to say again. “Love, Queen” doesn’t clarify; as an alternative it asks you to maintain wanting. It requires your undivided consideration and endurance. In doing so, you’ll be able to really feel your self divulge heart’s contents to new understanding. And for those who’re affected person, the grammar of Pendleton’s visible language slowly unravels.
