Vom Abend: Joe Bradley

Name: Joe Bradley
Start: 2024-4-11
End: 2024-5-18
Location: David Zwirner

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Now Open

April 11—May 18, 2024

Opening Reception

Thursday, April 11, 6—8 PM

Location

533 New York

533 West 19th Street

New York

Artist

Joe Bradley

View Press Release

David Zwirner is pleased to announce Vom Abend, an exhibition of new paintings by Joe Bradley at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location. This is Bradley’s debut exhibition with David Zwirner, following the announcement of his representation by the gallery in May 2023. On view are a group of large-format paintings that build on the forms and compositional structures Bradley has been exploring in recent years. In addition to the exhibition, David Zwirner Books will be producing a major publication on Bradley, which is scheduled to be released in 2025.

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“Abstract painting doesn’t feel totally on the nose with these anymore. There are nods and references to the world around us, and to forms and nature, and animals and plants. Those sorts of things are really starting to come to the surface.”

—Joe Bradley, March 2024

Developed over several years through a deliberate process of painterly accumulation and adaptation, the works in this exhibition are marked by an unassuming yet assertive sense of compositional balance whereby the interrelation of individual parts—such as patches of color, stipples of paint, and lines that at times outline shapes and forms and at others float freely—cohere into a resounding whole.

“He covers most of the canvas, working with a narrower brush, which eliminates big gestures and pulls you close to the surface. The colors are of equal heat; white lines course through them, creating shapes, separating areas into broad patchworks that include mountain-like profiles or suggestions of flat fields.… There's a marked disinterest in closing anything off; glimpses of what's beneath are actively present.”

—Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic, The New York Times

Bradley worked on the paintings simultaneously, letting the process of developing each one play off of or influence the others. As a result, shared or related elements and palettes recur throughout in different and surprising ways. Modest-sized circular forms that appear in the periphery in one painting find larger, more centralized counterparts in another.

Joe Bradley, Together, 2023-2024 (detail)

Specific colors from Bradley’s lively palette of reds, blues, greens, yellows, and oranges are applied in large swaths of paint in some works and in others they are used like accents or interjections that create strong visual contrasts.

“Throughout his different bodies of work, Bradley has maintained a consistent palette, a surprising line of connection between the diverse groups.… The idea that color could stand for itself—or be accepted as such—without having to serve a specific representation was important for him.… Like the commercially colored vinyl, the cadmium family of pigments served as a sort of readymade register of colors.”

—Kim Conaty, chief curator, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Joe Bradley, Kalparush, 2023-2024 (detail)

Densely applied passages of speckled paint and daubs of oil provide texture and color modulation in certain areas of individual paintings, while in others the dots are larger and more sparingly applied, appearing like celestial expanses or evening skyscapes.

Though they represent a continuation of the painterly trajectory the artist has been pursuing since the middle of the 2010s, these paintings also reflect new turns in Bradley’s practice. As part of the evolution of the artist’s work over the past ten years, figurative elements have started to become more evident in these paintings than in prior ones. The subtle suggestion of faces, animal-like figures, plants, and other organic forms are legible throughout the works.

“A Joe Bradley painting is many things, but it is not for the dainty of heart. When you walk amongst his canvases you walk through a kind of dream jungle where the meaty atmosphere is mottled and streaked with sinuous filaments that may or may not cohere into something you think you recognize.”

—Charles Schultz, managing editor, The Brooklyn Rail

Line, which had faded from Bradley’s painterly repertoire for a period of time, has reappeared in recent years—here as white and dark bands that read like pictographic overpainting in some areas, or like outlines demarcating patches of colored ground. Drawing has long been an important medium for Bradley, and his use of line in these paintings reflects the novel ways in which he has come to balance the linear and the painterly in his work.

“The genius of Joe Bradley's drawings is their utter indifference to categories.… They are instead hazy, shambling vibes that come over you like a lyric, a blurt, or a melody.… It sounds absurd, actually, but Bradley's scrawl taps into a collective consciousness, and does so with minimal fuss.”

—Dan Nadel, curator-at-large, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles

Joan Miró, Blue II, 1961

Cosmic abstractions that look like moons or suns mix with eye-like shapes that recall the works of Alexander Calder or Joan Miró, and yet any figurative or stylistic references appear as part of an overall collaging of form, color, and facture without any one feature dominating.

Georg Baselitz, The Gleaner (Die Ährenleserin), 1978. Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © George Baselitz

A.R. Penck, Will Sign Become Reality? I, 1982

“He has been compared to greats from Philip Guston to Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg to the Chicago ‘Hairy Who’ artists.… I'll take the liberty of adding … some of the major figures of European expressive painting, starting with late Picasso … not to mention German artists Georg Baselitz and A. R. Penck.”

—Sir Norman Rosenthal, curator and art historian

“I was listening to a lecture by Paul Schrader who wrote Taxi Driver, and one of his bumper stickers was: ‘Make a rule. Break a rule.’ And I totally relate to that.… You establish a set of rules as a framework to work within and then when you deviate from those, and you make these little transgressions, that’s the spark where things happen.”

—Joe Bradley, March 2024

Inquire About Works by Joe Bradley