Architect David Adjaye’s marble sculptures paired with Adam Pendleton’s text-based paintings for Hong Kong show
- Adam Pendleton loves the work of David Adjaye. ‘I’ve never seen an architect use material with the same sensibility and sensitivity as an artist does,’ he says
- Adjaye and Pendleton share an exhibition in which both challenge our perceptions of history and identity and how we engage with culture and the world
British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye is bringing a new dimension of his creativity to Hong Kong – sculpture.
His marble artworks feature in a joint exhibition at Pace Gallery, Hong Kong, from May 18, along with the distinctive text-based paintings of New York-based African-American artist Adam Pendleton. Opening just before Art Basel Hong Kong, the exhibition reflects their shared sensibility.
The artists’ work challenges viewers to rethink how they see history and identity and how they engage with culture and the world around them.
Adjaye is best known for designing The National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington in 2016, and was recently given one of the highest honours in British architecture, the 2021 RIBA Royal Gold Medal, for his contribution to international architecture.
Though they are well established in the West, this will be the first time either of the artists has exhibited in Hong Kong. Adjaye believes the show’s universal themes will strike a chord with Hong Kong audiences.
“It’s a microcosm of the struggle we have in the world in trying to claim a public, collective space,” says Adjaye of the exhibition. “We’ve always been engaged in that struggle. I’m interested to see what the Hong Kong audience makes of it. There should be an empathy even though it’s a different language.”
I’ve never seen an architect use material with the same sensibility and sensitivity as an artist does. You don’t see a building and your impulse is to touch it. That’s what art does
Language features strongly in a set of works by Pendleton, Untitled (We are not) (2020), in which the phrase “We are not” is used with varying degrees of visibility. Taken from a text called Black Dada developed by Pendleton in 2008, the phrase has multiple meanings. Just as Dadaism challenged the nature of art, so Black Dada does with text, but in a racial context.
Mutations of the phrase appear, such as “Not Not We” and “Not Are We”, which take on a different meaning.
The form of Adjaye’s pyramid-like sculptures alludes to the oldest and most sacred structures on the African continent. Pendleton says the most interesting thing about Adjaye’s sculptures “is that they come together and come apart, they form a collective - and that is monumental”.
“That is also what my paintings attempt to communicate - the singular voice transforming into the collective voice - ‘we are not’,” he says.
The artists feel a deep connection with each other’s art. While Pendleton presents text and painting in an unconventional framework, Adjaye says he tries to gather people in an unconventional way. They met when Pendleton was installing art in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, in the US state of Colorado, in 2016 - a building designed by Adjaye - but Pendleton says he had already been struck by Adjaye’s work.
He was walking through Brooklyn when he spotted the studio of the artist Lorna Simpson, which Adjaye designed. He noticed the subtle way it stood out in the historic neighbourhood.
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“What makes me have a love and affinity towards David’s work is the way in which he uses material,” says Pendleton. “I’ve never seen an architect use material with the same sensibility and sensitivity as an artist does. You don’t see a building and your impulse is to touch it. That’s what art does - you want to know how it’s made. It’s a unique quality for an architect to achieve, and David is the only one in the world that I can ascribe that ability to.”
The colours of Adjaye’s sculptures match the black, white, and grey tones in Pendleton’s paintings and create visual cohesion. Marble serves as a record of time, he says.
“It’s a piece of earth compressed, with records of climate, world, our habitation of the world.“I wanted to create a different kind of reading of [the] language that one can see in Adam’s work - this is a geological language.”
Pendleton used the phrase “We are not” to ask why some people’s existence is less visible than others’. “It’s about the acknowledgement of existence in the same way the compression in this material is about the acknowledgement of existence,” Adjaye adds, referring to the marble.
Pendleton emphasises the importance of recognising ideas suppressed by history and understanding how they influence contemporary culture. “These histories are not forgotten, we live with them, we touch them, we experience them all the time,” he says. “They are just unknown or not communicated properly and effectively, which is something we’re both trying to achieve.”
David Adjaye Adam Pendleton, May 18 – June 30, 2021, Pace Gallery, 12/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong
