Friedman Benda is pleased to announce Who Owns Geometry Anyway?, an exhibition by Adam Pendleton. This marks the gallery’s first collaboration with the artist, and Pendleton’s inaugural exploration of furniture typologies.
Across mediums, Adam Pendleton’s practice is defined by its simultaneous embrace of the expressionistic, the minimal, and the conceptual—often within the context of a single work. He is deeply invested in reimagining form in relation to, and in tension with, the dominant themes and ideas of the historical avant-garde that have shaped modern and contemporary aesthetics. Seemingly simple geometric figures—circles, squares, triangles—become points of departure for complex material, visual, and theoretical investigations. Concerns from one mode of working—painting in relationship to photography, or sculpture in relationship to design—are continuously transposed, translated, and transcended. The result is a body of work that is formally striking, intellectually agile, and unexpectedly inventive.
For Who Owns Geometry Anyway?, Pendleton works in wood, onyx, and granite to extend his established vocabulary into functional form. The detailing and weighting of the objects is exquisitely resolved: wedges of timber slice through space, raised rims trace the edges of stone tabletops, feet taper into perfect curves. Dark rounds stand in contrast to tables punctuated by circular voids, suggesting displacement as form. Pendleton extends these explorations into the gallery’s architecture itself: a hard-edged, glossy black triangle and a stark white square, painted directly on the walls, frame the installation as an architectonic environment.
Isamu Noguchi—whose iconic designs are among Pendleton’s many references—once remarked that “art should become as one with its surroundings.” This principle resonates throughout Who Owns Geometry Anyway?. While self-assured and materially grounded, Pendleton’s objects embrace radical contingency. They break down the gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) into a porous, social form: provocative, open, and poetically alive.
Pendleton is currently the subject of a major exhibition, Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen, at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., on view through January 3, 2027. His first in the city, the exhibition foregrounds his unique contributions to contemporary American painting. In May, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced the acquisition of all 35 works from Pendleton’s landmark exhibition Who Is Queen? (2021–2022).
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