Adam Pendleton. Blackness, White, and Light

Blackness, White, and Light was the first extensive European solo exhibition of the New York-based artist Adam Pendleton (* 1984, Richmond, VA). His multifaceted work—which includes painting, drawing, sculpture, and film—recognizes the complicated sensorial experience of moving through the world in the twenty-first century. As an immersive work of art, his exhibition aimed to transform the museum into a space for conversation, creating a dialogue between artworks and viewers, and multiplying monophonic voices into a polyphony of ideas. Pendleton investigates Blackness as a color, an identity, a method, and a political subject—in short, as a multitude. He also poses urgent yet open 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 idea of Black Dada, an ever-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.