Adam Pendleton debuts furniture typologies at Friedman Benda.

43 minutes ago7 min read

Walking into Friedman Benda’s New York gallery right now is like stepping into a vibrant, three-dimensional argument titled 'Who Is afraid of geometry anyway?'—a question that artist Adam Pendleton poses not just with words but with a startling collection of new furniture typologies that reorient the entire space into a field of competing shapes and historical echoes. Pendleton, known for his multidisciplinary 'Black Dada' investigations that collage aesthetic traditions with political and cultural fragments, has pivoted from canvas and print to the tactile realm of domestic objects, and the effect is both disorienting and deeply compelling.This isn't merely furniture; it's a series of propositions about who gets to claim the language of form. The clean, often cold, lines of modernism—think Le Corbusier's brutalist concrete or the Bauhaus' industrial ethos—are here re-appropriated, fractured, and imbued with a rhythmic, almost musical sensibility that feels more like a visual representation of a John Coltrane solo than a Mies van der Rohe blueprint.One piece, a shelving unit that leans precariously, its angles refusing to conform to right-angled expectations, seems to ask why stability must always be the default. Another, a table whose surface is a mosaic of mirrored and matte black triangles, plays with perception in a way that directly challenges the utilitarian purity that has long dominated design discourse.This exhibition feels like a natural, if bold, extension of Pendleton's ongoing project to deconstruct and re-contextualize the visual codes of Western art history, now applying that same critical lens to the objects we live with daily. By placing these works in a high-design gallery like Friedman Benda, a temple to collectible design, Pendleton forces a conversation about value, authorship, and the very boundaries between art and craft. It raises fascinating questions: Can a chair be a manifesto? Can a bookshelf hold more than books, but also the weight of cultural memory? The show doesn't offer easy answers, but it successfully transforms the gallery from a passive container of art into an active, geometric battlefield where the rules of form are up for grabs, and the answer to 'who owns geometry' seems to be, thrillingly, everyone and no one at once.

#art exhibition

#geometry

#furniture

#Adam Pendleton

#Friedman Benda

#design

#New York

#featured

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