ART CITIES:N.York-Joe Bradley
Joe Bradley’s large-scale canvases bring together various references to movements in 20th century art history, from Primitivism and Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism and Pop Art. Bradley’s works recall the iconography of arcade game graphics, TV test patterns and logo branding, implementing comedic and playful elements to examine non-objective ideals of the past whilst taking a humanist approach to consumer culture.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery Archive
Joe Bradley’s first large-scale museum exhibition in North America is on show at Albright-Knox Art Gallery. At the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Bradley received attention for a series of monochrome canvases arranged into figurations. Although primarily minimalist experiments à la Ellsworth Kelly, on closer inspection they resolved into crude figures, as their reduced aesthetic evoke association with computer games and primitive totem sculptures. Thanks to these arrangements, and their subtle, narrative titles, the monochrome surfaces, mostly painted on simple, pre-produced canvases, acquired a meaning of their own, addressing 20th-century developments in art theory and taking a playful look at the many and varied artistic experiments on the cusp of abstraction and figuration. To anyone expecting an artist’s oeuvre to develop continually and predictably, the series that followed appears as a spectacular break or turning point, in these “Schmagoo Paintings”, the colors vanish. They are gigantic pictogram-like scribbles made with grease pencil on white canvas, oscillating between figuration and abstraction in a way reminiscent of, but entirely different to, the “Multi-panel paintings”. These minimalist works dramatize universal codes andsymbols. Like children’s drawings, their reduced visual idiom follows the modernist impulse towards a primitive art but with an ironic nod to cartoons, which play a key role in Bradley’s work. The ”Schmagoo Paintings” (schmagoo is slang for heroin) are also a humorous search for the archetypal, as the artist says “The word stuck with me, and I began to think of “Schmagoo” as shorthand for some sort of Cosmic Substance… Primordial Muck. The stuff that gave birth to everything […] I have been thinking of Painting as a metaphor for the original creative act”. In another series he makes large screen prints showing silhouettes of people in the poses of Egyptian figures. Another ongoing series featured in the artist’s first solo show at Galerie Eva Presenhuber comprises large-format paintings on unprimed canvases using an artistic vocabulary recalling Guston, Basquiat, and Paleolithic cave paintings. The canvases, mostly painted flat on the floor with a range of instruments, bear the traces of the (performative) processes leading to their creation. The special character of the paintings conserves the physical act of painting, and its style situated somewhere between abstract expressionism and naïve imagery, evokes a broad range of associations. The exhibition also includes examples of Bradley’s recent figurative bronzes based on found amateur sculpture and his silkscreen paintings based on the wide-ranging images (from comics to outdated periodicals) that so often inspire his work.
Info: Curator: Cathleen Chaffee, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York, Duration: 24/-1/10/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-17:00, www.albrightknox.org
