Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen
April 4, 2025 – January 3, 2027
Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen is landmark exhibition of new and recent paintings as well as a single-channel video work. For his first solo exhibition in Washington, D.C., 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 between 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 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.
Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with scholarly essays, Studio Hirshhorn and Hirshhorn Eye videos, and free public programs.
