EXHIBITIONS
Adam Pendleton “Notice Everything”
Dates: Nov 5 – Dec 19, 2026
Location: Taka Ishii Gallery Kyoto
Opening reception: Thursday, Nov 5, 15:30 – 17:30
For Adam Pendleton’s first exhibition in Japan, Taka Ishii Gallery Kyoto presents “Notice Everything,” an intimate selection of new paintings, drawings, and ceramics. Across these distinct bodies of work, Pendleton uses color, gesture, fragment, and form to explore how different processes and materials can generate new visual possibilities.
The exhibition includes Pendleton’s largest “Composition” paintings to date. Beginning with gestures made in watercolor on paper, Pendleton documents and translates these marks through a screen-printing process, transforming something immediate and fluid into vibrant, layered works on canvas. Deep blues, purples, and reds overlap and intermingle, producing unexpected chromatic relationships and interstitial fields of color. Rather than treating color as a fixed or purely expressive element, Pendleton approaches it relationally: One color acts upon another, creating shifts in perception across the surface of the painting.
Pendleton’s new ceramic works extend this investigation through material and scale. Richly glazed black grounds—at moments so deep they seem almost to disappear—hold spare geometric compositions in suspension. Here, the traditions and techniques of ceramics are approached through the concerns of painting: surface, ground, color, edge, and the relationship between figure and field. The works move between object and image, allowing the physical properties of clay and glaze to complicate the apparent simplicity of their compositions.
At just six by six or twelve by twelve inches, the “Days” drawings operate at a markedly different register. Their intimate scale concentrates Pendleton’s ongoing exploration of mark-making, gesture, and color into small but expansive visual fields. Each drawing records a particular sequence of decisions—marks made, interrupted, layered, or left open. Encountered individually and in relation to one another, they invite sustained attention to subtle differences of density, rhythm, and form.
Together, the works in “Notice Everything” articulate Pendleton’s sustained engagement with the formal, historical, and conceptual possibilities of painting. Photography, screen-printing, drawing, watercolor, and ceramics are not treated as discrete mediums and disciplines but as processes that can act upon and transform one another. Pendleton moves between the hand and the mechanical, immediacy and deliberation, allowing each translation to introduce something unforeseen.
The exhibition’s title suggests an orientation toward both making and looking. To notice everything is not to apprehend everything at once, but to remain attentive to what emerges: the shift of one color against another, the trace of a gesture after it has been reproduced, the changing depth of a black surface, or the way a modest mark can reorganize a field. Across paintings, drawings, and ceramics, “Notice Everything” proposes attention itself as a generative act—one capable of continually renewing what a work can become and what a viewer might encounter within it.
Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is a central figure in contemporary art. A celebrated painter, he pushes the boundaries of the medium through a sustained engagement with process, language, and form. Typically composed of two or three colors on black-gessoed grounds, his paintings extend nonlinear compositional traditions rooted in twentieth- and twenty-first-century approaches to abstraction. His work, a distilled layering of gesture, fragment, and form, is also marked by a precision reminiscent of conceptual and minimal art as well as a freely expressionistic, experimental drive. In 2008, he began to define the working method for which he is now widely recognized as Black Dada—a critical framework that explores the relationship between Blackness, abstraction, and the historical avant-gardes.
In 2024, Pendleton was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recent solo exhibitions include “Adam Pendleton: Some Wild Kind of Language”, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2026–2027); “Adam Pendleton: Can I Be?”, Langen Foundation (2026); “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen”, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (2025–2027); “Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White, and Light”, mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2023–2024); “Adam Pendleton: To Divide By”, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2023–2024); “Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept”, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2022); “Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together”, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022); and “Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?”, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (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 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 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Tate, London; and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.
