Adam Pendleton spent twenty years making art in a language that only he could speak fluently, in which markers, hieroglyphs and short full-range texts converged into an abstract form that hovered between early modernism, protest signs and graffiti. While this is a language that is not entirely discernible at the beginning, it is worth taking the time to learn how to appreciate it. Pendleton has less projects than providing clarity, but rather encourages careful inspection and deep introspection.
These efforts are fully visible in his extensive exhibitions Love Queen and the Hesshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (as of January 2027). Looping in the inner ring gallery of the museum, such as liturgy, visual clips echo throughout the circular room towards aesthetic and emotional implosion, just as a series of metaphors do in the fable. Sometimes they don’t feel like paintings, rather than paintings in the mid-lecture or fragments of futuristic texts.
Pendleton had long shadows of conceptualism in the early 2000s, when painting felt as if it had been caught again. He chose to resurrect it inaccurately, but instead redirected it, viewing the canvas as a stage of linguistic and cultural conflict. Art historic influence from Franz Kline to Glenn Ligon is filtered through Pendleton’s cool, steady logic. His process starts with ink or watercolor gestures on paper (drips, splashes, shapes) and then shot, layered and screen printed onto a large black cover floor. Combining signage with references to typography, poetry and Xerox art, his canvas, while not always clear, never remain silent.
The best paintings in the show are more organic, especially the works in the “Unt Title (Japan)” series, which began in 2020. High contrast, white is black, marking repeats and forms crescent. The exhibition also includes the latest entry from Pendleton’s Black Dada series (2008), which represents most of his previous black and white canvases. Thanks to the black gold and neon green cuts, they are bolder and louder than their predecessors, a way that feels a bit distant and cold, even a little exotic. However, the letters he contains, a hidden concealment of each canvas, are as difficult to understand as his earlier works. Until the light hits the canvas just right.
The final work of the show, The resurrection city is reexamined (who has geometric shapes?)This is a rare moment of emotional clarity. The single-channel video projected to the ceiling and brings together documents from the 1968 Poor Movement, a protest camp that took over the National Shopping Center in months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. But Pendleton sees the material here as historical facts, rather than a series of fusion memories that are filled with emotions and spread to the present. Triangles and circles flash on the screen, sometimes disappearing, and sometimes making them halo by chance. He magnifies the object so closely that he is no longer in the focus, and then he contrasts with the panoramic lens, thus making the point of a curious bystander differentiate. Stitched together, the narrative slowly merges from a million interrupted images.
Pendleton’s work may never be addressed for his audience. Its meaning will change based on your position, how long you stay, and what you are willing to go back and say. “Love, Queen” Not explaining; instead, it asks you to keep searching. It requires your full attention and patience. This way, you can feel open to new understandings. If you have patience, Pendleton’s visual language grammar will fade away.
