Joe Bradley

Since making his debut in New York in the early 2000s, Bradley has developed a mutable visual style through paintings, drawings and sculptures, that bridges the art historical canon with popular culture and personal experiences. While art history is an undercurrent in Bradley’s œuvre, his awareness of these influences frees him to make them his own. In his early modular colour field paintings, he challenges some of the key tenets of Minimalism by injecting irony and figuration. His Schmagoo series, childlike and rudimentary grease-pencil drawings on canvas embrace mark-making and humour. Bradley’s most recent paintings are large gestural works that challenge the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. Painted on the floor and at times cut and stitched together, these works record the detritus and history of the studio, resulting in radiant and layered paintings that evoke a wealth of associations. Joe Bradley eludes the notion of a signature artistic style and rejects a linear form of career progression. What he is building, instead, is a body of work that is eclectic, fluid and constantly evolving.

Joe Bradley (b. 1975, Kittery, ME, US) lives and works in New York. He trained at the Rhode Island School of Design and first exhibited in New York in 2003. The artist was given a solo show at MoMA PS1 three years later. Bradley was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and The Forever Now, a landmark exhibition of contemporary painting at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2014. Among others, his work is held in the following collections: Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.