ADAM PENDLETON

Exhibiting in the Canary Islands for the first time, Adam Pendleton presents a solo exhibition at Fundación Canaria para el Desarrollo de la Pintura (FCDP), featuring two large paintings from his Untitled (WE ARE NOT) body of work – one from FCDP’s collection – alongside a grid of 48 drawings on Mylar.

Since he began making art in the early 2000s, Pendleton has developed an expansive approach that employs gesture, fragment, text, and image to re-contextualize histories of painting, Blackness, abstraction, and the historical avant-garde. Deploying collage as model and method, Pendleton places traditionally separate ideas and processes in close proximity, creating an uneasy, fluid state that opens up new spaces for thinking and seeing.

Pendleton’s works challenge convention by blurring distinctions between painting, photography, and drawing, rendering visually active and spatially complex works that give visual form to what the artist describes as the ‘complex real’—the onslaught of sensory phenomena and often contradictory information that defines contemporary experience. His multi-stage process begins on paper by exploring the full breadth of mark-making. He layers paint, spray paint, ink, and watercolor, while integrating fragmentary text and geometric forms through stenciling techniques.

These works on paper are photographed and then layered using a screen-printing process. The resulting works are at once expressionistic, minimal, and conceptually rich.

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984 in Richmond, VA, USA) is an artist based in New York. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at such notable museums as Hirshhorn Museum | Smithsonian in Washington (2025), Mumok in Vienna (2023), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2021), Le Consortium in Dijon (2020), and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2017). His work has also been featured in the Whitney Biennial (2022), the Venice Biennale (2015), and other prominent group exhibitions, including Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum in New York (2021).

Writing and publishing are central to Pendleton’s practice, and his many books include Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths (2021), Who Is Queen? A Reader (2021), Heavy as Sculpture (2021), and Black Dada Reader (2017). – PEDRO CERA