This Artist’s Powerful Abstract Pieces Reimagine What a Painting Is
Adam Pendleton brings his geometric artworks to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
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Behind a curved partition at the entrance of the exhibition “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, a single-channel video plays. Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?) opens with a sequence of geometric forms, circles and triangles with shadows passing behind them and slight reflections playing off their surfaces. As the shapes cycle through, they blur, mutate and pulse. A triangle that appears to be backlit by a burst of light echoes an image of the top of the Washington Monument’s obelisk structure. Black-and-white documentary footage, sometimes tinted with red, plays as the earlier shapes flash over it, at times calling to mind a vision test.
Adam Pendleton, the artist behind the work, is in some ways running his own sort of vision tests. Across his video and painting work, he deploys subtle and sophisticated shifts in tone, texture and surface, showing how the slightest change of light or angle can completely alter a work. Straightforward shapes like circles and triangles become intricate and complex in his treatments, enticing viewers and demanding to be examined closely. “I’m trying to bring the viewer’s attention to the level of the work,” he explains.
The short film is scored by composer and multi-instrumentalist Hahn Rowe and includes audio of poet Amiri Baraka reading his piece “I Love Music (For John Coltrane).” The refrain “can be” is repeated and paired with different phrases, which is apt for the sense of possibility and wonder in Pendleton’s work. The film features footage from Resurrection City, a temporary encampment set up on the National Mall in 1968 as part of the Poor People’s Campaign started by Martin Luther King Jr., where thousands lived for a period of weeks.
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While there’s an extra poignancy in the work being shown at a museum on the National Mall, it wasn’t intended to be site-specific, and Pendleton was first pulled in by the visual rather than historical aspect of the event. “I actually became interested in Resurrection City through the photographs of photojournalist Jill Freedman,” he says. “I was seduced by the formal qualities in her photographs, these very saturated blacks, these grays, with light gray, medium gray, dark gray.”
Pendleton’s video complements the over 30 paintings that make up the exhibition, a showcase of works the artist has completed in the last three years. Across media, he creates forms that can be thought of both literally and symbolically, as well as images that work on multiple levels. Hirshhorn head curator Evelyn Hankins says, “He works through ideas about conceptual art, minimalism, gestural abstraction, to a point where the video shares a lot of the same conceptual and formal concerns that the paintings do.”
The artist’s paintings go through a transformational, multistage process, starting with painting and marking paper with drips, aerosol sprays and other textures. Stencils and fragments of text are also incorporated. These images are photographed, blown up and reconfigured to create compositions that are then screen-printed onto canvas. “What he’s doing is bringing together all these different traditional media to create painting,” Hankins says. It’s an approach to painting that remakes the idea of what exactly a painting can be.
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A prominent material in Pendleton’s work is black gesso, typically used to prime a surface so that paint can be applied and absorbed more easily. Pendleton uses it in all of the paintings at the Hirshhorn, and while it’s sometimes subsumed by the layers of silkscreen ink, in other places it’s very pronounced, and that’s intentional. “I’m very much interested in bringing the support structure or what is perceived as the supporting act or the foundation of something to the foreground and conflating these relationships between foreground and background,” he says.
Born in Richmond, Virginia, Pendleton grew up thinking of Washington, D.C. as “the nearest big city, so the Hirshhorn in my mind was akin to MoMA or the Guggenheim.” Over the course of his storied career, he has had paintings acquired by the Guggenheim and a landmark solo show at MoMA, in addition to numerous other accolades. Throughout, he’s maintained a reputation for his conceptual rigor and deep exploration of the full range of his materials. “He’s intensely curious, and his questions about painting never stop coming forward,” Hankins says.
“Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” is on view at the Hirshhorn, through January 3, 2027, alongside another ongoing exhibition, “Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960,” which commemorates the museum’s 50th anniversary. That show’s examination of how abstraction evolved is a fitting pairing to Pendleton’s own probing of abstraction. The artist calls working abstractly “a mode, method, form that really articulates both the physical and poetic potential of what we can do.”
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Pendleton’s displayed works, all created between 2022 and 2025, showcase several distinct bodies of work. One of these is his Black Dada series, a concept he’s been working on in various forms since 2008. In this most recent iteration of the Black Dada paintings, the letters of the titular phrase are distributed across the works’ surfaces and titles, their placement on the canvas determined by an underlying grid and not at all random.
His works reveal more each time they’re viewed, and their open-ended nature prompts different understandings and connections.
“I don’t want people to passively look at the paintings or simply see an image,” Pendleton says. “I want them to realize they are having an encounter with a concept, an idea made physically manifest.”