The Manufactured Disorder of Adam Pendleton's Abstractions

Exhibition design can make for a skilful seductress. I’m well reminded of this at Adam Pendleton’s exhibition ‘An Abstraction’ at Pace Gallery in New York, where the artist has installed his paintings in a maze of black walls which cut sharp diagonals across the gallery. As I meander through this landscape, a drama of concealing and revealing unfolds: tantalizing sightlines afford glimpses of paintings partially obscured by the walls, and a chase to stand in full view of them ensues. For the most part, each side of any given wall is mounted with only one painting, leaving ample space for the pictures to beckon their viewers closer. Adding to the intrigue, many of the works are rendered with intense, highly saturated colour, a striking departure for an artist known for his limited black and white palette.

Yet, despite the refreshing exhibition design and Pendleton’s exciting break into colour, the paintings themselves – particularly those bright ones belonging to the most recent iteration of Pendleton’s body of work ‘Black Dada’ (all works 2023–24) – left me craving more risk. These pieces, made with silkscreen ink and black gesso on canvas, harmonize with rather than transcend the white cube gallery’s stiflingly pristine aura; they read as neat and placid despite their bold colouration. The anxious visual density that characterizes the best of Pendleton’s paintings from previous years – for example, those in his 2021 ‘Who Is Queen?’ exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art – is evacuated and replaced by sleek, airbrushed-looking smoothness.

Since 2008, Pendleton has used the term ‘Black Dada’ to define and experiment with the interplay between blackness, abstraction and language. Like previous works by the same title, the examples at Pace contain glyphs and strokes that visually allude to the unruly scrawl of graffiti and gestural abstraction. But they only suggest messiness, failing to achieve it. Their seemingly wayward mark-making appears calculated: as the same or similar gestures and shapes are repeated, they fail to generate productive friction. And beneath Pendleton’s calligraphic marks, carefully drawn angular lines and shapes often appear, imposing a contrived, measured formal grammar that further dilutes the scrawls’ supposed effortlessness. Put succinctly, these ‘Black Dada’ paintings convey a manufactured idea of disorder rather than disorder itself.

At Pace, each painting is marked by a single letter, which, when pieced together, read ‘BLACK DADA’. A metaphor animates this manoeuvre: the viewer has to work to decipher blackness as it is slowly spelled out in the letters scattered across the paintings. In theory, it could be an effective gesture, but the full weight of it does not hold up in Pendleton’s work here: the riotous, reeling proclivities that inhere in both the aesthetics of Blackness and of dada are subdued by the restrained tenor of the paintings. This linguistic game flatlines into play without substance. What and how is the notion of ‘Black Dada’ signifying in these paintings?

On the labyrinth’s outer edges, the black and white Untitled (Days) works – made with media including silkscreen ink and gesso – and several achromatic examples from the ‘Black Dada’ drawings – made with silkscreen ink on paper – offer a welcome shift in tone, returning to the tension and activity that buzzed in Pendleton’s originary philosophical and artistic conceits. Here, wide-ranging forms, shapes and techniques of mark-making pattern surfaces. Rich with idiosyncrasies, the small-scale drawings, in particular, evidence the expressive capacities of the artist’s hand. I hate to pigeonhole Pendleton as ‘the artist who works in black and white’, but it seems that in returning to this constraint, he has also returned to the exploration of pattern and line that makes his work elsewhere more fruitful.

‘Adam Pendleton: An Abstraction’ is on view at Pace, New York until 16 August

^{Main image: Adam Pendleton, ‘An Abstraction’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: Pace Gallery}