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Lot Essay
For Joe Bradley, painting is an immersive process that fundamentally bridges the voids of time and space. Discussing his engagement with the medium, the artist comments: "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… You can be in conversation with those men and women in the caves—it’s like yesterday, you know? I think that time moves slower in painting. And maybe that accounts for a lot of the anxiety around painting in the last 40 or 50 years. You have the 20th century wrapping up and everything is moving at this breakneck speed? And then, painting is still walking. It’s just a very human activity that takes time" (J. Bradley quoted in L. Hoptman, "Joe Bradley", Interview Magazine, reproduced at https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/joe-bradley [accessed 25 January 2016]).
Typical to the paintings he produced at this time, in Untitled (Freek) Bradley works directly upon raw cotton duck, which he prefers over the slick, gessoed surface of a commercially-primed canvas. The unstretched canvas aids in his working method: while he might begin with the canvas spread on the ground, he could switch at any time and tack it up on the wall, turn it over to paint the verso, or throw it aside to accumulate a schmutzy patina that he so desires. Bradley’s working method of stitching canvas segments together into a larger, more cohesive whole can also be seen. The rich texture of the unprimed surface of Untitled (Freek) only adds to the raw, primal immediacy of Bradley’s abstract forms, which issue forth from the gritty world of its dirt-smeared background. In this way, Bradley upends the traditional notion of the holy, relic-like art object. Like his predecessor Jackson Pollock, Bradley dismantles the hierarchy of painting, taking it down from its podium and throwing it onto the floor, where his abstract style has free reign. "It’s easy to see Basquiat, Guston and cave painting in [Bradley’s] messy, bold lines and weathered textures. In these large abstractions, scribbled-looking passages are set against areas of canvas marked only with dirt … The canvases are painted on both sides, so that faint areas of flat color, visible from the back, are in dialogue with heavily painted areas on the front, which often include contrasting colors laid over each other. The result is real visual electricity" (B. Boucher, "Joe Bradley", Art in America, 25 March 2011).
Typical to the paintings he produced at this time, in Untitled (Freek) Bradley works directly upon raw cotton duck, which he prefers over the slick, gessoed surface of a commercially-primed canvas. The unstretched canvas aids in his working method: while he might begin with the canvas spread on the ground, he could switch at any time and tack it up on the wall, turn it over to paint the verso, or throw it aside to accumulate a schmutzy patina that he so desires. Bradley’s working method of stitching canvas segments together into a larger, more cohesive whole can also be seen. The rich texture of the unprimed surface of Untitled (Freek) only adds to the raw, primal immediacy of Bradley’s abstract forms, which issue forth from the gritty world of its dirt-smeared background. In this way, Bradley upends the traditional notion of the holy, relic-like art object. Like his predecessor Jackson Pollock, Bradley dismantles the hierarchy of painting, taking it down from its podium and throwing it onto the floor, where his abstract style has free reign. "It’s easy to see Basquiat, Guston and cave painting in [Bradley’s] messy, bold lines and weathered textures. In these large abstractions, scribbled-looking passages are set against areas of canvas marked only with dirt … The canvases are painted on both sides, so that faint areas of flat color, visible from the back, are in dialogue with heavily painted areas on the front, which often include contrasting colors laid over each other. The result is real visual electricity" (B. Boucher, "Joe Bradley", Art in America, 25 March 2011).