Adam Pendleton Holds Our Attention
Nostalgia, says the artist Adam Pendleton, “isn’t really my vibe.” We’re sitting across from each other at his studio in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, neither of us wearing shoes — a condition for entry. His assistants pad around softly. The space is pristine and discreet. The only exception is the room in the back where Pendleton, 40, paints; there, inks have drizzled onto strips of rosin paper covering the floor, and the counters are crowded with bottles of spray paint and exhibition maquettes. Even still, the shelves are neatly labeled: “brushes large,” “brushes small.” Perhaps Pendleton’s reluctance to look sentimentally at the past isn’t all that surprising; he seems to favor a stripped-down view in both his practice and his surroundings.
He calls his artistic philosophy Black Dada, a term that melds his interest in the avant-garde with his ongoing theories of Blackness. It’s also the name of one of his longest running and best-known bodies of work; begun in 2008, it features abstract paintings and drawings, mostly in black monochrome, depicting letters from the titular phrase and strokes of ink and gesso. The project “does not give me a clear sense of purpose per se, because it’s not about clarity, but it does give me a direction,” he says — a structure through which he can think about why he paints the things he does. In “An Abstraction,” his current solo exhibition of 25 new drawings and paintings at Pace Gallery in Chelsea, the “Black Dada” pieces on view there are a departure from previous iterations, incorporating vivid blues and reds, a crisp green and a yolky yellow.
“I think what emerges in [the show’s] paintings is the feeling of a visual vocabulary,” he says. “Working with it — but also working to abandon it. Which is to say, using it, but always trying to find something new.” That balance between engagement and abandonment in favor of the new aligns with his resistance to nostalgia: Look back, but stay detached. When he put together a manifesto for Black Dada in 2008, he wrote, “History is in fact an incomplete cube shirking linearity.”
The word “shirking” comes to mind at certain points in our conversation; Pendleton is warmly, playfully evasive. He won’t tell me much about the first artwork he made as a teen. But he does tell me that his mother, a former schoolteacher, played him Miles Davis back then. These days, he’ll still listen to “In a Silent Way,” Davis’s 1969 album — but only every so often. Born in Richmond, Va., he left home young. First at 16 to study art in the medieval Italian town of Pietrasanta. And then again at around 18, when he moved to New York, soon making a name for himself with his work “The Revival,” presented at the 2007 Performa biennial.