Tuesday 5 March 2024

New York: Adam Pendleton An Abstraction / May 3 – Jun 20, 2024

 


Pace is pleased to present An Abstraction, an exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by New York-based artist Adam Pendleton, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York from May 3 to June 20.

Pendleton’s first solo show at Pace’s New York gallery in ten years, An Abstraction follows a series of significant solo exhibitions by the artist at museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2021; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2022; and mumok, Vienna in 2023. The return to his home city marks a continuation of his career-long project of creating spaces of engagement and “fighting for the right to exist in and through abstraction.”

Pendleton’s work indexes and documents the physical process of painting to create layered pictorial fields that—in their painterly, psychic, and verbal expressions—announce a new mode of visual composition for the 21st century. He is guided by a visual and structural philosophy he has termed “Black Dada,” an ongoing inquiry into Blackness and its relationship to abstraction and conceptions of the avant-garde. Investigating Blackness as a color and theoretical proposition, the artist’s work reflects a contrapuntal understanding of the world in both sensorial and conceptual terms.

In An Abstraction, the artist’s 12 paintings and 13 drawings will hang within a monumental, site-specific architecture consisting of five black triangular forms. These sculptural walls will reorder the gallery into new, unexpected spaces and extend the visual language of the exhibited works.

Bringing together the artist’s Black Dada and Untitled (Days) bodies of work, the new paintings and drawings in the exhibition feature a variety of marks—spray painting, stenciled geometric forms, and expressionistic brushstrokes—to blur distinctions between painting, drawing, and photography and propose painting as a documentary and performative act.

Pendleton’s new Black Dada works imbue his iconic black and white compositions with focused and saturated colors. Each of the paintings and drawings in this body of work bears one or more typographic letters from the phrase “BLACK DADA,” rendered in a sans serif font amid the artist’s gestural marks. Continually transposing and overwriting these two modes of inscription, Pendleton cultivates a living library of his own ever-evolving gestures and processes.

Paintings and drawings from Pendleton’s Untitled (Days) body of work will also be featured in An Abstraction. Using collagist strategies of indexing, daily mark-making, fragmentation, and recombination, these works create a cumulative portrait of the artist’s experimentations in the studio.

In spring 2025, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. will present Love, Queen, a landmark exhibition of Pendleton’s work that will anchor the institution’s 50th anniversary year.

About the Artist

Born in Richmond, Virginia in 1984, Adam Pendleton completed the Artspace Independent Study Program in Pietrasanta, Italy, in 2002. His work has been featured at major museums around the world, including solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, among others.

Adam Pendleton’s work is a reflection of how we increasingly move through and experience the world on a sensorial level—a form of abstraction that, in its painterly, psychic, and verbal expression, announces a new mode of visual composition for the twenty-first century.

It investigates Blackness as a color, an identity, a method, and a political subject—in short, as a multitude. His work also poses questions about the legacy of modernism in the present day, reactivating ideas from historic avant-gardes across mediums and moments in time. Since 2008 he has articulated much of his work through the frame of Black Dada, an evolving inquiry into the relationships between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. It’s a visual philosophy that confounds the distinctions between legibility and abstraction, past and present, familiar and strange, reminding us that meaning always develops through difference.

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Anatomize by Nibha Sikander Booth 3D33 | Art Basel Hong Kong 2023

 


About Anatomize Nibha Sikander’s artworks showcasing detailed representations of moths and birds are the artist’s attempt at a pointed confrontation of the violence we have exerted upon other species of our planet.

 In Anatomize, Sikander draws from a desire to elevate the level of deconstruction and abstraction that she had showcased in her last series, Wandering Violin Mantis. Moving away from anatomically accurate replicas of moths, the artist has made one major change in her work, by enlarging their forms. This allows her to study and analyse them in greater detail. Her arrangement of these details is influenced by the specimen-like presentation of taxidermy in museums. However, in this series Sikander’s methodical layout of the fragments of the species depicted appears closer to an imaginary script solidifying her position at the intersection of science, craft, and art.

As described by curator Roobina Karode, Sikander’s works “are manifestations of the artist’s entomological interest that seeks not to dissect, but to deconstruct the received notions of natural history.” Working exclusively with paper Sikander succeeds in creating a world that invites the viewer in closer, almost as if through a magnifying glass. According to her, paper mimics nature in its versatility – soft, stiff, malleable and flexible, almost like wings, feathers and antennae – allowing her to mould it to her will.

About the Artist

Nibha Sikander earned her Bachelors (2006) and Masters (2008) in Visual Arts from the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara.

In 2019, Nibha had her first solo exhibition, Wandering Violin Mantis at TARQ. Since her graduation, she has been part of several group exhibitions, some of which include The Inner Life of Things: Around Anatomies and Armatures at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Noida (2022); ALCHEMY: Explorations in Indigo, Kasturbhai Lalbhai

Museum, Ahmedabad (2019); Beyond Borders, curated by the CONA Foundation at the Whitworth Gallery/Museum, Manchester, England (2017-18); A New Space, Nazar Art Gallery, Vadodara (2016); Back to College, VADFEST, Faculty of Fine Arts, Vadodara (2015); A Construal of Mourning and Rage, Emami Chisel Art, Kolkata (2014); Group show at Studio X, as part of the Paradise Lodge International Artist Residency, Mumbai (2013); Beauty and the Beast, Matthieu Foss Gallery, curated by Anne Maniglier, Mumbai, (2011); Show Girls!, Strand Art Room Gallery, curated by Anne Maniglier, Mumbai (2009); From our Cabinets to the Museum, Open Eyed Dreams Gallery, curated by Aparna Roy, Kochi (2009); and Class of 2008, Art Konsult Gallery, curated by Bhavna Khakkar, New Delhi (2008-09).

Museum, Ahmedabad (2019); Beyond Borders, curated by the CONA Foundation at the Whitworth Gallery/Museum, Manchester, England (2017-18); A New Space, Nazar Art Gallery, Vadodara (2016); Back to College, VADFEST, Faculty of Fine Arts, Vadodara (2015); A Construal of Mourning and Rage, Emami Chisel Art, Kolkata (2014); Group show at Studio X, as part of the Paradise Lodge International Artist Residency, Mumbai (2013); Beauty and the Beast, Matthieu Foss Gallery, curated by Anne Maniglier, Mumbai, (2011); Show Girls!, Strand Art Room Gallery, curated by Anne Maniglier, Mumbai (2009); From our Cabinets to the Museum, Open Eyed Dreams Gallery, curated by Aparna Roy, Kochi (2009); and Class of 2008, Art Konsult Gallery, curated by Bhavna Khakkar, New Delhi (2008-09).

She has taken part in residencies like Paradise Lodge International Artist Residency, Lonavala, Mumbai (November 2013); Sandarbh International Artists Residency Programme, Jaipur (November 2012); and Residency at the American School of Bombay, Mumbai (March – May 2010).

She is the recipient of the Nasreen Mohamedi Scholarship, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, 2004-2005. She recently participated in India Art Fair 2020 in Delhi. Nibha currently works and lives in Murud-Janjira and Mumbai

About TARQ

TARQ was founded in 2014 by Hena Kapadia on the values of creating a meaningful conversation around art and its myriad connotations and contexts. It was envisioned as somet    hing of a laboratory – an incubator for young contemporary artists which would work towards pushing the boundaries of how contemporary art in India is exhibited and perceived. TARQ’s youthful and experimental ethos encourages collectors, novice and seasoned alike, to approach art collecting through a perspective that marries thoughtfulness with an inquisitive eye for aesthetics and artistic processes.

Since its conception, TARQ has endeavoured to create a robust outreach program that ties in with the gallery’s exhibitions and overall raison d’être. The program is an amalgam of educational initiatives in the form of workshops, gallery walk-throughs and talks. Our intention is to engage with a diverse audience to develop an informed viewership for contemporary art in the future

TARQ

KK (Navsari) Chambers, Ground Floor, 39B AK Nayak Marg, Fort, Mumbai 400001, 022-66150424

Tuesday – Saturday: 11:00am – 6:30pm