Adam Pendleton:

Becoming Imperceptible

Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible was the largest solo presentation of the artist’s work to date. Including film, wall paintings, ceramics, and silkscreens (on mylar, glass, steel, and canvas), this exhibition framed the artist’s work as a continual cross-referencing and collage of modern aesthetic and social histories. At the center of this exhibition were found images and texts, which served as source material for Pendleton over the last ten years. Reframed and perpetually recurring, these images and words have been described by the artist as “indistinct.” And yet, they serve as bedrock for his artistic practice.

His distinct form of abstraction interweaves the history of Civil Rights Movements, the pre-war Avant-Garde, La Nouvelle Vague in film, and Minimalist and Conceptualist art practices of the 1960s. Becoming Imperceptible positioned Pendleton’s practice as a kind of counter-portraiture. If traditional portraiture figures the subject in contrast to or against its background, Pendleton’s works aim to disappear or camouflage the subject amid constantly alternating surfaces. The same, or almost the same, images returned again and again across the exhibition and yet what these images signified often varied. 

Adam Pendleton was born in 1984 in Richmond, Virginia. He attended the Artspace Independent Study Program, Pietrasanta, Italy. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art;  Pace Gallery, London; and Pace Gallery, New York. He lives and works in Brooklyn.