Adam Pendleton 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 visually distinct and conceptually rigorous paintings begin on paper with drips, splatters, sprays, geometric shapes, words and phrases, and inky fragments reminiscent of broken letters. These compositions are photographed and then layered using a screen-printing process, purposefully blurring the distinctions between the acts of painting, drawing, and photography. An encounter with any single work, 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.

A polymath, Pendleton also edits critical anthologies, makes films, and composes site-specific exhibitions and sculptural interventions. Writing for The New York Times, Siddhartha Mitter described his critically acclaimed 2021 exhibition, Who Is Queen?, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York as one that "built [its] own museum inside MoMA – an experiment in change from within, offering a radically different method of display from the chronological unfolding of the Modernist canon in the institution's galleries." For over a decade, Pendleton has articulated his approach to art through the framework of Black Dada, an ever-evolving inquiry into the relationship between Blackness and abstraction.

Pendleton’s work has been shown at major museums around the world. Recent one-artist and group exhibitions include Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021–2022); Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022); Quiet as It’s Kept: 2022 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, (2022); Adam Pendleton: To Divide By, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2023–2024); and Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White, and Light, mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2023–2024). His forthcoming one-artist exhibition, Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen, presented at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., will debut in the spring of 2025.

Pendleton’s work is held in numerous public collections worldwide including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Tate, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.