At 46, the well-known painter changes direction, emphasizing intuition over concept to make the most riveting paintings of his career.
Joe Bradley has been having solo shows in New York galleries since 2003. But his latest at Petzel — his first in six years — feels like the first show of the rest of his career.
His new paintings are strong-colored works that balance gracefully between representation and abstraction. They may be the most conventional of Bradley’s career, but they are also the most engaging.
Bradley devoted the first decade of his CV to what might be called ironic, anti-painting paintings. They were post-conceptual and challenging: You had to decide if they qualified as paintings. The best of these bare-minimum works was a series of enormous raw canvases that boasted a single motif outlined in black oil crayon. While monumental, they had the intimacy of doodles and were drawn all at once without adjustments, which was impressive.
Then came a transitional phase during which Bradley started applying paint with a wide brush to dirty canvases whose footprints and paint drips were part of the composition. These were rough and beautifully scaled. But the play of intention against accident was familiar, from somewhere between Julian Schnabel and Abstract Expressionism.
Not by coincidence, Bradley’s trajectory accelerated: In 2011 he left Canada, after three solos, for Gavin Brown’s enterprise and another three. In 2016 he joined Gagosian, a pinnacle of success not known for carefully handling younger artists. After one show in New York and three elsewhere, he left in 2021.
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