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When artist Adam Pendleton was growing up in Richmond, Virginia, he thought of Washington, DC, “as the big city,” he recalled recently, “and the Hirshhorn was the big museum.” The Hirshhorn Museum was “in many ways, my hometown museum,” he said, and the works of modern art he saw there “left an imprint on my mind, on my spirit, and maybe on the deepest part of me, on my soul.”
Pendleton has since fashioned a high-flying career as an abstract painter over almost two decades, garnering both critical recognition and commercial success. He has had notable solo and group shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His works have been acquired by the Guggenheim Museum and the Tate Modern among others. In 2024, he received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The same year his Black Dada (K) painting sold at auction for $1 million.
Now the artist, born in 1984, is launching his first solo exhibit in DC at the institution that had such a formative influence on him. Love, Queen, which is on view until January 3, 2027, is the result of a three-year collaboration with the Hirshhorn’s head curator, Evelyn C. Hankins.
The exhibit comprises 35 paintings, some freshly created for the show and none from before 2023, from three existing series, Black Dada, Days, and WE ARE NOT, and two new ones, Composition and Movement. It also includes a new video work Resurrection City (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?) whose main source material is black-and-white still and moving images of the titular encampment set up on the National Mall in 1968 as part of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign.
Visiting this single exhibit becomes an efficient way to appreciate the sweep of Pendleton's career and especially his claim on abstraction within the history of modern art that so strongly informs his practice.
In the artist’s opinion, “Love, Queen demonstrates the possibilities and capacities of abstract and complex thought through the medium of painting,” Pendleton said at a preview of the exhibit.
Love, Queen is a must-see for even casual followers of abstract and conceptual art. The exhibit overall provides an excellent sense of the breadth of paintings that this leading figure in contemporary abstract art is making right now. While not all the paintings landed, to me the distillation of mind, body, and spirit into two dimensions that Pendleton strives for, the video installation’s combination of archival footage, abstract imagery, and sound elements unquestioningly does.
And because Pendleton says he is “always drafting and revising” at the same time, the selections for Love, Queen also signal both where he is going and where he has been. Consequently, visiting this single exhibit becomes an efficient way to appreciate the sweep of his career and especially his claim on abstraction within the history of modern art that so strongly informs his practice. Plus, the reactions between Love, Queen and the Hirshhorn building’s “aggressive architecture” (as Hankins describes it) and the survey exhibit of the museum’s collection from 1860-1960 in the neighboring gallery produces a uniquely site-specific frisson.
Pendleton has been perhaps best known for his monochromatic works on canvas, often incorporating snippets of text, created through a multi-step process that brings together painting, photography, drawing, and printmaking. In Love, Queen, the emphasis on text begins to recede while a preoccupation with geometry becomes more pronounced. This streamlined exhibit sees the artist iterating on a common set of elemental forms—circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, and language fragments—and applying a painting practice that uses marks, drips, splatters, and spray.
The paintings of Love, Queen, which are on display in the Hirshhorn’s inner circle gallery, are separated into seven segments around the continuous loop space. Each series is largely grouped together, with occasional interpositions from other series.
Yellow splotches roughly form the shape of an off-center set of wind turbine blades. Another irregular streak of yellow marks the right corner while a lonely black letter “D” set on its side clings to the painting’s left edge.
Coley Gray
“There’s much more of a distinctive and clear engagement with color and gesture and expressionistic gesture,” Hankins said of Pendleton’s Love, Queen paintings in an interview.
Appropriately then, the exhibition starts with two large-scale paintings distinguished by a yellow that appears next to the black alternatively golden or stoplight warning signal or egg yolk. In Black Dada (D) yellow splotches roughly form the shape of an off-center set of wind turbine blades. Another irregular streak of yellow marks the right corner while a lonely black letter “D” set on its side clings to the painting’s left edge.
It’s paired with Untitled (Movement) whose looser, softer yellow-hued shapes have a more organic feel and are unevenly distributed on the canvas’s right half. In both, though the color initially draws the eye, the variations in the black—matte and shiny, saturated and faint—are more intriguing.
Pendleton’s virtuosity with gradations of black is even more apparent in the monochromatic Days series. He imperfectly repeats shapes and patterns, with swatches or bursts of black drawing attention to a rich layering achieved with a limited palette. One Untitled painting is anchored by a barely legible spray-painted “Love Queen” looking as though it could have been scratched on a bathroom stall wall above which a surfeit of carbonation bubbles drift upwards.
Take your time. Look closely. Open your mind and, of course, open your eyes.
Adam Pendleton
The 14 works in the Composition series are set apart by the painted black wall against which they are hung and by their intimate scale. Here geometric shapes come to the fore. Triangles, circles, and squares of varying sizes and states of structural integrity arrange themselves in different formations and relationships to each other and the empty space around them.
Many suggest unmoored planets leisurely moving through outer space. This evocation of cosmic emptiness perhaps explains why this series in particular read, for me, as somewhat dry intellectualized exercises in abstraction.
Love, Queen “is not about quick looking. It’s about deep, thoughtful engagement and using your imaginative potential,” Pendleton advised when previewing the exhibit. “Take your time. Look closely. Open your mind and, of course, open your eyes.”
Despite this invitation, on my first circuit of Love, Queen’s painting gallery I found myself instead gathering speed from the centrifugal force of the gallery, spending less time with each work as I accelerated into the final curve of the vortex. But really, I didn’t mind because it brought me sooner to the video gallery, the exhibit’s final stop where the stunning 9 ½-minute Resurrection City (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?) screens every half hour.
The projected floor-to-ceiling video begins by rapidly flashing full-screen triangles and circles, forms we’ve seen in the preceding paintings. It soon cycles into archival black-and-white still and moving images from the civil rights era while the geometric shapes continue to re-appear throughout, along with snippets of other footage.
The still images come from photographer Jill Freedman’s astonishing extended photo-essay documenting the community dubbed Resurrection City, formed of makeshift shacks and tents on the National Mall, and the culmination of King’s Poor People’s Campaign in 1968. (A display at DC’s main MLK library provides an engaging history of the Campaign.) The protest movement demanding jobs and the end to poverty involved tens of thousands of people over six weeks. Freedman focused her camera mostly at the small scale, though, rather than the masses—close studies of individuals’ faces, their living conditions, and their relationships to each other.
The video’s soundscape is a collage of distinct elements: “That’s All Right,” a Gullah spiritual recorded in 1963; poet and activist Amiri Baraka’s spoken word-style reading of his “I Love Music (For John Coltrane)” in 1980 and “Against Bourgeois Art”; recordings of Congressional hearings prompted by the Campaign; and a multi-instrumental score by Hahn Rowe commissioned for this work.
I like creating relational moments and spaces where questions emerge. The blur, as in the confusion, the ambiguity, creates a moment of recognition.
Adam Pendleton
“To my mind, Resurrection City is as much about painting as it is about archival footage,” Hankins told me. “Notice all those flashing gestures when it fades from sky to abstraction or landscape to abstraction. I like to think of that video as painting as a time-based medium.”
However, the video’s strobing light, quick, hard edits, and syncopated audio produce a high-intensity, hyper-stimulating immersion in sight and sound that conveys an entirely different emotional valence than the dispassionate abstract Love, Queen paintings. So, too, does the video’s invocation of the civil rights era and the power of protest.
Pendleton says he was drawn originally several years ago to Freedman’s images not for their content “but by their lush blacks and grays, and these kind of surface and tonal realities that she was able to capture.” (He also demurs about commenting directly on the current political climate. “I think about the long arc of history,” he told me in an interview. “We have to embrace the complexity of any given moment and have perspective.”)
But the video’s centering of an American social movement about race, especially the Black experience, and class and the history of injustices, struggles, and resistance is inherently a political act. The exquisite construction of Resurrection City is a case in which aesthetics and abstraction—the cycling between light and dark, the harmony then dissonance of images and audio, the play between specific portrayal and universal geometric forms—serve to power a message that very much speaks to the moment.
“Can I get a—like they say—witness? An eye that can see through this,” Baraka asks urgently, calling on each of us to not turn away.
“If we do not stop this madness, we will certainly destroy our world,” a disembodied woman’s voice on the soundtrack warns, speaking aloud what all of us fear.
Having been pulled down into the core of the vortex and now spit out, I could enter the Love, Queen painting gallery again in the proper state to follow Pendleton’s advice, feeling both energized and enervated as one does by a close escape.
This time around, not grasping so hard for representational analogies, I could perceive better Pendleton’s experiments in abstraction. The oscillation of centers of gravity in the paintings, keeping off balance the space of the canvas. The variants from crisp to wispy in the outlines of the repeated geometric shapes. The rhythm created by alternating the paintings’ scale and orientation and color.
I could appreciate the several glass door views into the adjacent, first-rate exhibit Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960 (also up until January 3, 2027) as portals for serendipitous dialogues between Pendleton and his predecessors mining the same veins of abstract and conceptual art. Peering through one door, I glimpsed Annette Lemieux’s Nomad, a monochromatic large canvas like many of Pendleton’s. The immediacy of her marks, made by walking in bare feet dipped in black paint directly on the canvas surface, contrasts with the premeditated layering of his. Through another was the graphomaniac Four Talks by Laurie Anderson, a wildly different take on legibility compared to Pendleton’s remnants of text.
It also gave me time to ponder the exhibit’s title. Is Love, Queen the sign-off to a letter? A command? A plea? Who is speaking? Who is listening?
That ambiguity is purposeful, said Pendleton. “I like creating relational moments and spaces where questions emerge,” he told the preview night audience. “The blur, as in the confusion, the ambiguity, creates a moment of recognition.”
Through deep looking, he offered to exhibit-goers, “I hope you can find some piece or some part of yourself in each work that you encounter.”
Love, Queen in large part succeeds at teeing up just this kind of simultaneously unsettling and affirming encounter between art and self. For the unhurried viewer, be prepared for Pendleton’s latest body of work at the Hirshhorn to leave its imprint on you.
Header Image: Installation view of Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, April 4, 2025–January 3, 2027. Photo: Andy Romer
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