A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

Greatness isn't achieved in an instant. It's tested until there is no question — only performance.

It’s been an extraordinary period for Adam Pendleton, a youngish Black artist whose theoretically informed and critically praised art would seem to be out of step with our revanchist times. But there’s apparently no end to the demand for his work. Last November, he achieved a record $1 million at Sotheby’s for a work originally estimated at only $150,000. During the May sales, Untitled (We Are Not) from 2020 sold at Phillips for a little more than half a million dollars, his third-highest public price. Speaking in his 25th Street office earlier this summer, Marc Glimcher told me that he “couldn’t get a bid in” on a rare work by Pendleton to come up at auction. “I’ve never not sold out a show of Pendleton’s work.”

Last week, Pace Gallery opened a capsule show of Pendleton’s work, titled spray light layer emerge, at its relatively new space in Berlin, Die Tankstelle. The show consists of three paintings and a selection of drawings, all abstract works that do not immediately betray their meaning as politically and socially engaged works of art. As Glimcher explained to me, the artist’s process-heavy work involves a lot of trial and error through many steps in different media. “More than half end up in the trash,” he said with no little sense of resignation at the lost sales. “That’s not cheap. Any money he makes goes back into making art.” The loss rate also means Pendleton doesn’t produce much: An earlier profile estimated the artist only makes about 12 canvases a year. Glimcher says he doesn’t have any work in inventory—hence the bid at auction.

Further complicating the matter, Pendleton is an artist that museum curators love. Just before the Phillips auction in May, MoMA announced that it had bought all 35 works from a mammoth 2021 multistory installation that Pendleton made for the museum. One writer described the installation as a museum within the museum, presenting the artist’s own radically different view of the “modernist canon.”

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

Greatness isn't achieved in an instant. It's tested until there is no question — only performance.

You can easily see how institutional demand and strong support from collectors—Laurene Powell Jobs, Michael Ovitz, Venus Williams, and Steve Cohen are all names that pop up in the press—create the conditions for high prices. But the final piece of the demand puzzle also came earlier this year when the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. opened Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen for an extended run through all of 2026.

Pendleton first came to the attention of many collectors and curators at Performa in 2007, when he created a performance piece called “The Revival” that combined a gospel choir with spoken poetry and quotations. Although his other work sometimes involves complex installations combining his paintings and films with structures, his paintings are mostly concerned with process. He makes images on paper, often using words and abstract marks, sometimes combining them into other images, and then photographs them to make screen prints on large canvases. In that sense, his work fits neatly into a steady pattern of process-driven abstract art over the last two decades. Think of any number of artists, from Christopher Wool and Mark Bradford to Glenn Ligon and Jack Whitten, and Pendleton’s work won’t seem remote or foreign.

More than for any other artist, though, interest in Pendleton’s work seems to be driven by the experience of meeting him and engaging with his sometimes gnostic ideas, as captured in the notion of Black Dada. The phrase comes from a 1964 poem or song and performance piece by Amiri Baraka, titled Black Dada Nihilismus, which has remained fairly impervious to clear interpretation. But in the broadest terms, the idea is to engage with the history of Black people in American culture, politically and socially as well as aesthetically, often around abstraction in art. Still, even though Pendleton has published a Black Dada reader and has been widely quoted defining the term as “a way to talk about the future while talking about the past,” no two people seem to understand that the same way.

In some ways, frustration over the term’s ambiguity is what led to the Hirshhorn show. Evelyn Hankins, the show’s chief curator, explained to me that too much of the conversation around Pendleton seemed to dwell on his ideas—when she wanted to really look at the paintings and how they were made. “The Black Dada paintings are so compelling to critics that they’ve somehow missed how amazing the paintings are,” she said. In other words, she wanted to get the art, which she describes as “framed by rules but not rule-bound,” back into the center of the Pendleton conversation.

Of course, with Pendleton, a show isn’t as simple as the artist delivering paintings and collaborating on where they’re hung. Like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn gallery is a round structure, this one designed by modernist architect Gordon Bunshaft. One quirk of the building is that interior galleries narrow as you wander through them. Pendleton at first wanted to create more scaffolding for the show, like he did at MoMA. But gradually he came to understand that the Hirshhorn building would squeeze viewers closer and closer to his work. Or, as Hankins put it, the paintings “create bodily and emotional intimacy in the space.”

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