Pace Prints is honored to present Voices, its first solo exhibition of leading contemporary painter Adam Pendleton, well known for his abstract works that upend expectations of gesture, language, and conceptual form. Created in partnership with Pace Paper studios in Gowanus, Brooklyn, Voices extends Pendleton’s exploration of the phrase “WE ARE NOT” through stenciled and pigmented handmade paper, with select works incorporating hand-applied acrylic and ink. This show is the first in a series of exhibitions that will commemorate a decade of artwork centered on the generative phrase, culminating in a 2028 solo exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, featuring pieces made in collaboration with both Brand X Editions and Pace Prints.
Pendleton’s iconic WE ARE NOT paintings explore language as an abstract form of collective expression and address. Truncated, layered, and overwritten, the words collide with shifting degrees of legibility, producing a field in which assertion and negation coexist. Pendleton has described his WE ARE NOT paintings as operating “like the voices of a multitude.” Rendered in capital letters, the phrase carries the urgency of protest and the anthemic force of a rallying cry, yet resists becoming a fixed imperative. Voices brings this polyphony into sharper resonance. Through repetition, the exhibition stages a refusal that is neither absolute nor singular. A suggestion of a gathering, the declaration holds open: who might speak through it and why?
Tension takes a material form, as Pendleton employs paper pulp to sculpt his lettering, working in his characteristic black and white palette alongside lustrous silvers, rich blues, and deep reds. Each monoprint begins with the pulling of a large sheet of white or pigmented paper. Successive layers of stencils establish gestures and letterforms using a variety of pulps and water-based media, before the wet sheet is pressed and dried. In select works, hand-applied acrylic and ink further give Pendleton’s vernacular both poetic and material weight. Paper becomes an active part of the statement, its reinforcing substance physically shaping the words it carries.
The resulting surfaces draw the viewer to a nexus in the middle of reading and looking. Language becomes architecture, organizing the surface even at places where readability has broken down. Pendleton unsettles the relationship between signifier and signified, as marks that invite comprehension also ask us to attend to texture, density, and spatial relationships. Meaning emerges through this shifting encounter without ever determining a certain, deciphered understanding. Pendleton’s overlapping syntax gives form to a collective voice, as “WE ARE NOT” disperses into gesture and shape, returns to legibility, and the cycle begins again.
Voices will be on view November 19–December 19, 2026, at Pace Prints, 536 West 22nd Street, New York.
Please contact info@paceprints.com to inquire or request additional information.
