Gardner Museum Artist-In-Residence Adam Pendleton sheds light on forgotten history – or disrupts established histories by building new potential associations. His multifaceted projects, which include painting, collage, film, and publishing, re-contextualize historical and theoretical positions on abstraction, Blackness, and the avant-garde. Working predominantly in black-and-white, Pendleton often creates installations that envelop viewers and push the limits of contemporary discourse.

Pendleton creates collages from material found in books and from his own drawings and paintings, silk-screening them onto sheets of transparent film. For this artwork, Untitled, (Giant not to scale), 2019-2020, the artist features a photocopied image of a carved figure taken from a book, transferred onto a clear sheet and set against a painted surface of circle and squares. The figure, several times removed from its source, becomes the connective tissue that hovers between transparency and opacity. By using this strategy of collage and juxtaposition the artist is creating a new visual language of cultural encounter and association.