“I think that time moves slower in painting. And maybe that accounts for a lot of the anxiety around painting in the last forty or fifty years. You have the twentieth century wrapping up and everything is moving at this breakneck speed? And then, painting is still walking. It’s just a very human activity that takes time.”
Joe Bradley is widely known not only for his work itself—powerful abstract paintings and instinctive drawings—but also for his willingness to start again in new materials, in new palettes, and in new artistic vocabularies. Following the early critical recognition of his modular paintings, Bradley made what appeared to be a complete one-eighty and began exhibiting a gleefully discordant array of grease-pencil drawings on drop cloth; large-scale oil paintings on canvas; silkscreens; drawings; and most recently, incongruously polished reimaginings of found amateur sculpture.
Joe Bradley (American, born 1975). East Coker, 2013. Oil on canvas, 100 x 102 inches (254 x 259.1 cm). Private Collection. Image courtesy of the artist. © 2017 Joe Bradley.
Joe Bradley (American, born 1975). Untitled, 2016. Bronze, 15 x 15 x 11 1/4 inches (38.1 x 38.1 x 28.6 cm). Gagosian Gallery. Image courtesy of the artist. © 2017 Joe Bradley.
Joe Bradley (American, born 1975). Good World, 2017. Oil on canvas, 86 1/8 x 75 inches (218.8 x 190.5 cm). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Gift of Mrs. George A. Forman, by exchange; the Albert H. Tracy Fund, by exchange; the Charles W. Goodyear Fund, by exchange; and the George B. and Jenny R. Mathews Fund, by exchange, 2017 (2017:2). © 2017 Joe Bradley.
Including examples from these diverse bodies of work from the past decade, Bradley’s mid-career survey at the Albright-Knox captures his ever-changing approach to artmaking and unique take on abstraction and the evolutions of style. Check back throughout the course of the exhibition for closer looks at each of the artist’s different bodies of work from the past decade.
