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Lot Essay
‘I think you do kind of slip into a trance when you look at a painting. At least I do’ (Joe Bradley)
Colour erupts in mesmeric flashes of pale pink, teal, cobalt blue and burnt umber in Joe Bradley’s Untitled (2015). The painting belongs to a body of work for which Bradley laid unprimed canvas on his studio floor so that it accrued an organic painterly patina, lifting imprints of paint, dirt, footprints and other workshop detritus. Fervently applied surges of paint build vibrant textural layers over this weathered ground. Bradley painted on both sides of the canvas, so that colour from the reverse bleeds through the unprimed material. The palimpsestic surface is further marked by raised seams which divide it into quadrants. Bradley burst onto the contemporary New York art scene in the early 2000s, receiving immediate and unprecedent acclaim for his formally varied yet uniformly arresting body of work. His paintings are held in important public and private collections worldwide, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris.
Bradley was born in 1975 and grew up in Kittery Point, a small town on the southern coast of Maine. Moving to New York in 2000, the city’s tradition of big, bold painting found new resonance in his work. Colour emerged as a driving force, from early monochromatic canvases arranged in irregular geometric formations to works such as the present in which the palette seems to take on a life of its own, exploding and blossoming across the canvas. Discussing the spirit of experimentation and play which underlies his work, Bradley explains: ‘it’s like skin, you know? The work all shares the same sort of DNA, but it just looks different’ (J. Bradley in conversation with L. Hoptman, ‘Joe Bradley’, Interview, 15 May 2013).
Bradley’s visual idiom is perpetually in motion, careening between art-historical allusions and single-minded investigations of process. His canvases—like those of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who also often worked directly on the floor—reveal the urgency of these experiments and lines of visual enquiry. Echoes of Abstract Expressionists like Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning emerge in fleeting juxtapositions of line and colour. For Bradley, the act of painting involves a conscious intervention in this dialogue with the medium’s history. ‘I think that painting relates very neatly to inner travel and the exploration of inner worlds’, he explains. ‘With painting, I always get the impression that you’re sort of entering into a shared space. There’s everyone who’s painted in the past, and everyone who is painting in the present’ (J. Bradley quoted in ibid.).
Colour erupts in mesmeric flashes of pale pink, teal, cobalt blue and burnt umber in Joe Bradley’s Untitled (2015). The painting belongs to a body of work for which Bradley laid unprimed canvas on his studio floor so that it accrued an organic painterly patina, lifting imprints of paint, dirt, footprints and other workshop detritus. Fervently applied surges of paint build vibrant textural layers over this weathered ground. Bradley painted on both sides of the canvas, so that colour from the reverse bleeds through the unprimed material. The palimpsestic surface is further marked by raised seams which divide it into quadrants. Bradley burst onto the contemporary New York art scene in the early 2000s, receiving immediate and unprecedent acclaim for his formally varied yet uniformly arresting body of work. His paintings are held in important public and private collections worldwide, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris.
Bradley was born in 1975 and grew up in Kittery Point, a small town on the southern coast of Maine. Moving to New York in 2000, the city’s tradition of big, bold painting found new resonance in his work. Colour emerged as a driving force, from early monochromatic canvases arranged in irregular geometric formations to works such as the present in which the palette seems to take on a life of its own, exploding and blossoming across the canvas. Discussing the spirit of experimentation and play which underlies his work, Bradley explains: ‘it’s like skin, you know? The work all shares the same sort of DNA, but it just looks different’ (J. Bradley in conversation with L. Hoptman, ‘Joe Bradley’, Interview, 15 May 2013).
Bradley’s visual idiom is perpetually in motion, careening between art-historical allusions and single-minded investigations of process. His canvases—like those of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who also often worked directly on the floor—reveal the urgency of these experiments and lines of visual enquiry. Echoes of Abstract Expressionists like Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning emerge in fleeting juxtapositions of line and colour. For Bradley, the act of painting involves a conscious intervention in this dialogue with the medium’s history. ‘I think that painting relates very neatly to inner travel and the exploration of inner worlds’, he explains. ‘With painting, I always get the impression that you’re sort of entering into a shared space. There’s everyone who’s painted in the past, and everyone who is painting in the present’ (J. Bradley quoted in ibid.).