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. For his first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, Adam Pendleton will highlight 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 between the act of painting, the act of drawing and the act of photography.
Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen will feature 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 will also debut Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?), a new video work that will be 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, which 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 the late poet and cultural critic Amiri Baraka with an orchestration of brass, woodwinds and drums.
In its totality, Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen will offer a powerful counterpoint to the Museum’s collection surveys that will be concurrently presented in adjacent galleries.
Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen will be 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.
About Adam Pendleton
Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is a central figure among a cross-generational group of painters redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
His work has been shown at major museums around the world. Recent solo and group exhibitions include 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 (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 (2021–2022).
Pendleton’s work is part of numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; and Tate London.
Image: Portrait of the artist. © Adam Pendleton. Photo: Matthew Septimus. Adam Pendleton, WE ARE NOT (Composition), 2024. Silkscreen ink and black gesso on canvas; 19 × 15 in. (43.3 × 38.1 cm). © Adam Pendleton. Photo: Andy Romer
