Adam Pendleton

Can I Be? is a major solo exhibition by Adam Pendleton, bringing together key bodies of work across painting, drawing, sculpture, and video.

Pendleton is widely recognized for a practice that reconsiders the language of abstraction. His paintings unfold through a distilled vocabulary of gesture, fragment, and form. Layers of mark-making give rise to compositions that are at once conceptually rigorous, expressive, and precise.

Central to his work is the concept of ‘Black Dada,’ a critical framework through which Pendleton engages the intersections of Blackness, abstraction, and the historical avant-gardes. The exhibition gathers more than 80 works, including a large selection of drawings, offering a comprehensive view of his practice at this moment. Here, abstraction emerges as an active, generative force—capable of holding perception, history, and politics in dynamic, poetic tension. In dialogue with Tadao Ando’s architecture, Can I Be? invites viewers to consider how meaning is constructed through form, relation, and experience.

Adam Pendleton was born in 1984 in Richmond, Virginia, USA. He has exhibited internationally at major museums and institutions. Recent solo exhibitions include Adam Pendleton: Can I Be? at the Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany (2026);  Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (2025–2027); Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White, and Light at mumok, Vienna (2023–2024); Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022); and Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021–2022). Pendleton’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York;  the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Tate, London; and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.