Adam Pendleton — New Work, Pace London, 2015

14.5 × 21 cm folded / 29 × 21 cm unfolded. Offset print on folded card. Very good vintage condition with light handling wear and minor surface marks consistent with age and storage.

Exhibition invitation issued by Pace London for Adam Pendleton, New Work, First Floor, 6 Burlington Gardens, London W1S 3ET, 16 April – 23 May 2015. Private view: Wednesday 15 April 2015, 6–8 pm. The exhibition coincided with Pendleton’s participation in the Belgian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale.

The cover reproduces a work from Pendleton’s ongoing Black Dada vocabulary, in which image, typography, and political language remain inseparable. Produced in 2015, as Black Lives Matter entered broader public consciousness, the invitation records a moment when the language of protest and the language of contemporary art briefly occupied the same printed surface.

The inside text performs two functions simultaneously: an exhibition announcement and a public acknowledgement of the artist’s movement into an international institutional framework. The cover carries the work; the reverse carries the institution. Between them, the card records an exhibition at the point of distribution, before criticism, acquisition, or retrospective framing.

Its original function was temporary. Mailed, collected at the gallery, or discarded after the opening, the card existed to facilitate attendance rather than permanence. Surviving examples now operate differently. They preserve an exhibition before it became documentation and retain the administrative form through which the exhibition first circulated.

As Pendleton’s institutional profile has continued to expand, early gallery invitations associated with significant exhibitions and the 2015 Venice Biennale have acquired increasing relevance as primary documents of his early international circulation.

Shipping and handling included in the listed price.