In the latest series of his Black Dada paintings, shown at Pace New York last summer, as part of the show An Abstraction, Adam Pendleton expanded his vocabulary of color, infusing his compositions with purples, reds, and metallic tones.
For Pendleton, the rich washes of color on the surfaces of these works, “put my attention—and the viewer’s attention—on process, and how process merges with different formal possibilities,” the Richmond, Virginia-born artist explained at the time.
ADAM PENDLETON - Untitled (Blue Amphora)
Those latest paintings are reflected stylistically in the amphora he has created for Artspace and Avant Arte. Untitled (Blue Amphora) is one of seven amphorae created by a critically acclaimed group of contemporary artists with proceeds from the sale of each going to support charity: water in their endeavour to end the global water crisis.
You can see the full list of artists here and you can learn more about the amphorae and register for the draw to buy one or more here.
Built up in layers of spray paint, stencilled geometries, and expressionistic brushstrokes, Pendleton’s paintings and drawings are testimonies of his process in the studio. For him, each work is a visual archive of its own, indexing and documenting the physical, performative act of painting within the pictorial fields of his compositions.
ADAM PENDLETON - Untitled (Blue Amphora)
Pendleton has called painting “an act of translation.” This way of thinking about a painting as a record of a specific moment and place, the artist says, underpins his “very particular approach to gesture, mark making, and ultimately, experimentation.”
In the case of those latest paintings, Pendleton’s frenetic, layered abstractions speak to our attendant inundation with information, images, and other stimuli. The artist sees this formal phenomenon in his paintings as “a reflection of our multi-sensorial experience” of the world today.
Likewise, his amphora is a beautiful study in geometry, color, useful chaos even.
In this give and take between intention and happenstance, Pendleton investigates what emerges when the hard edges of geometric shapes are softened, rendered porous and poetic.
ADAM PENDLETON - Untitled (Blue Amphora) 
Pendleton has long been 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 his earliest Black Dada paintings Pendleton used only shades and tones of black, combining conceptual inspiration from serialised, logic-driven artworks like Incomplete Open Cubes (1974) by Sol LeWitt with layered, gestural applications of paint.
The introduction of color - in the case of the painting referenced by his amphora, ultramarine - is part of the process of transformation. With the amphora Pendleton moves from two to three dimensions, from canvas to clay, echoing the sequential transformations and diverse media that characterise his practice.
“For me, painting is an act of translation and transformation. At each successive step, I watch my gestures evolve and transform. The amphora feels like a natural extension of this approach,” he says.
Take a closer look at Pendleton’s Untitled (Blue Amphora) here.
You can learn more about the amphorae and register for the draw to buy one or more here.
All seven amphorae. From left created by: Jenny Holzer, Derek Fordjour, Adam Pendleton, Josh Smith, Jordan Casteel (back), Hilary Pecis (front), Harland Miller.
