Adam Pendleton: Untitled (Giant not to scale)

Gardner Museum Artist-In-Residence Adam Pendleton sheds light on forgotten history – or disrupts established histories by building new potential associations. His multifaceted projects, which include painting, collage, film, and publishing, re-contextualize historical and theoretical positions on abstraction, Blackness, and the avant-garde. Working predominantly in black-and-white, Pendleton often creates installations that envelop viewers and push the limits of contemporary discourse.

Pendleton creates collages from material found in books and from his own drawings and paintings, silk-screening them onto sheets of transparent film. For this artwork, Untitled, (Giant not to scale), 2019-2020, the artist features a photocopied image of a carved figure taken from a book, transferred onto a clear sheet and set against a painted surface of circle and squares. The figure, several times removed from its source, becomes the connective tissue that hovers between transparency and opacity. By using this strategy of collage and juxtaposition the artist is creating a new visual language of cultural encounter and association.

Header Image: Adam Pendleton (American, b. 1984), Untitled (Giant not to scale), 2019-2020. Artist’s rendering for Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade.

Adam Pendleton is a New York-based artist. In his paintings, drawings, and other works, he uses letters, words, drips, splatters, sprays, and collected images as primary materials. His work is a kind of continuous writing, in which language and gestural marks are recorded, transposed, and overwritten. Blurring the edges between modes of viewing and reading, between representation and abstraction, and between painting, drawing, and photography, Pendleton’s work is a visual philosophy of incomplete postulates. In 2008 he began to articulate his work through the idea of Black Dada, a visual project and ever-evolving inquiry into the relationships between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde.