Adam Pendleton and Antoni Tàpies Meet in Naples in a Quietly Charged Exhibition
At Alfonso Artiaco in Naples, a new exhibition places two artists from different generations in close proximity: American artist Adam Pendleton (b. 1984), whose practice is anchored by the conceptual framework of “Black Dada,” and Catalonian painter, sculptor, and theorist Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012), a major force in postwar art. The pairing is not presented as a neat comparison. Instead, it unfolds as a conversation shaped by material, gesture, and the physical intelligence of painting.
Representing Tàpies’s estate, his son Antoni Tàpies Barba and his wife Natasha Hébert said the artist’s work remains sharply relevant today. Fourteen years after his death, they pointed to themes that still feel urgent: the fragility of democracy, poverty, war, and the destruction of nature. In their view, showing Tàpies alongside Pendleton, a younger contemporary artist with a rigorous and poetic practice, feels both timely and meaningful.
Pendleton said the exhibition developed through conversations with Tàpies Barba and Hébert, and that he wanted to avoid illustrating a thesis too directly. Rather than forcing a one-to-one reading, he aimed to create conditions in which affinities could surface through rhythm, surface, scale, and structure. The works he selected move across different registers of his practice, but share an attention to gesture, fragmentation, and the material presence of painting.
That emphasis on pacing is central to the show. Pendleton said he thought carefully about where density gives way to openness, and where a surface feels compressed or suspended. Tàpies’s work, he noted, carries a physical and psychic weight that made the exhibition feel less like a comparison than an unfolding exchange between two distinct sensibilities.
Pendleton also said he has long been familiar with Tàpies’s work, which he admires for expanding abstraction through materiality, symbolism, and sustained attention to surface. What became especially revealing, he added, was the way language and sign operate architecturally in Tàpies’s compositions. Marks, letters, crosses, and accumulated matter do not read as illustration, but as structure.
That insight gives the exhibition its tension. Tàpies’s postwar legacy and Pendleton’s contemporary language meet in a shared interest in painting as thought, not just image. In Naples, the result is a measured, intellectually alert installation that asks how abstraction can still register the pressures of the present.
