The Hirshhorn Museum presents Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen, a landmark exhibition of new and recent paintings as well as a single-channel video work in the Museum’s second-floor inner-ring galleries from April 4, 2025, to January 3, 2027. In his first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, Adam Pendleton highlights his unique contributions to contemporary American painting while making use of the architecture of the Museum and the history of the National Mall.
Pendleton is known for his visually distinct and conceptually rigorous paintings that he begins on paper with drips, splatters, sprays, geometric shapes, words and phrases, and inky fragments reminiscent of broken letters. These visual experiments are at times carefully controlled and at others freely improvised. He photographs these initial compositions and then layers them using a screen-printing process, purposefully blurring the distinctions among the act of painting, the act of drawing, and the act of photography.
Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen features Pendleton’s Black Dada, Days, WE ARE NOT, and new Composition and Movement paintings. An encounter with any of these works, typically composed of two colors on black-gessoed grounds, brings forth the immediacy of gestural abstraction, the considered execution of minimal and conceptual art, and the playfulness of concrete poetry. “Painting is as much an act of performance as it is an act of translation and transformation,” the artist has stated.
The artist also debuts Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?), a new video work that is projected floor to ceiling. The work makes use of still and moving images of Resurrection City, the multiday encampment erected on the National Mall in the spring and summer of 1968 that is considered to be the culmination of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. Strobing in and out of darkness, the documentary material is interspersed with found footage and punctuated by flashes of geometric forms, dissolving the boundaries between abstraction and representation. The film’s score, by multi-instrumentalist composer Hahn Rowe, integrates a reading by late poet and cultural critic Amiri Baraka with an orchestration of brass, woodwinds, and drums.
In its totality, Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen offers a powerful counterpoint to the Museum’s collection surveys that are concurrently presented in adjacent galleries.
Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with scholarly essays, Studio Hirshhorn and Hirshhorn Eye videos, and free public programs.
The exhibition is organized by Evelyn C. Hankins, the Hirshhorn’s head curator, with support from former curatorial assistant Alice Phan.
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About Adam Pendleton
Adam Pendleton, a central figure in contemporary American painting, continuously redefines the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. Upending linear compositional logic, Pendleton’s paintings are created by a distilled layering of gesture, fragment, and form that mirrors the cacophony of contemporary experience. Each painting comes to life through its expressionistic flourishes, stark contrasts, and subtle uses of material, tone, and finish, as well as a precision reminiscent of minimal and conceptual art. Generative and poetic, his paintings create fluid and essential spaces for seeing, thinking, and feeling.
Pendleton’s painting process begins on paper by exploring the full breadth of mark-making. He layers paint, spray paint, ink, and watercolor while integrating fragmentary text and geometric forms through stenciling techniques. These works on paper are photographed and subsequently combined using a screen-printing process. Blurring distinctions among painting, drawing, and photography, the resulting paintings are a tangible manifestation of his belief in painting as a powerful “visual and conceptual force.”
In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2024–2025); Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White, and Light, at mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria (2023–2024); Adam Pendleton: To Divide By, at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2023–2024); Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City (2022); Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada (2022); and Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City (2021–2022).
Pendleton’s work is part of numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; and Tate Modern, London.
