Adam Pendleton
Black Dada — language, silkscreen and spray, arranged as an argument about how history is written.
Adam Pendleton was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1984 and did not go to art school, moving to New York at eighteen and showing by his early twenties. He works under a heading he calls Black Dada, taken from a poem by Amiri Baraka, which sets the historical avant-garde alongside Black radical thought and treats neither as settled. The paintings are silkscreened and sprayed in black and white on canvas and Mylar, layering fragments of text, redacted documents, photographs of the civil rights and Black Lives Matter movements, and letterforms broken down until they are almost illegible.
A market driven strongly by institutional acquisition since the mid-2010s, with the large silkscreen-and-spray paintings on canvas leading it. The surfaces are matt, black-dominant and unvarnished, which makes any scuff, fingerprint or retouch highly visible and difficult to correct; condition matters accordingly. Works on Mylar are physically delicate and are usually framed to a specification that forms part of the work. Editions and artist's books exist in modest numbers. Provenance to a documented gallery or museum source is the usual reference.
If you own a work by Adam Pendleton
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