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Lot Essay
Please note that this work has been requested for the forthcoming exhibition Joe Bradley, to be held at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, June-October 2017, and traveling to the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, October 2017-January 2018.
Every inch of Joe Bradley’s monumental painting, Flattop, is activated with the artist’s signature marks. The artist begins each painting with a swath of raw, un-stretched canvas placed directly on the floor. In this position, the canvas absorbs a patina of marks, including the dirt, dust and stains from previous use, coalescing into a layer of what the artist calls schmutz. “I usually have some kind of source material to work off of—a drawing or a found image—but this ends up getting buried in the process,” he explains. “Most of the painting happens on the floor; then I’ll pin them up periodically to see what they look like on the wall. I work on both sides of the painting too. If one side starts to feel unmanageable, I’ll turn it over and screw around with the other side... because I am working on unprepared canvas, I get this bleed through. The oil paint will bleed through to the other side, so I get this sort of incidental mark” (J. Bradley, quoted in R. Simonini, “Joe Bradley,” Believer, July 2012, p. 65). As such the final direction of the canvas isn’t completely determined until the painting is actually finished. In Flattop, after the painted marks had been achieved, Bradley paints squares of bright yellow, flame orange, and earthy brown and a long line of cerulean blue, all colors featured on smaller scale throughout the canvas. Thus, the canvas becomes a conversation about color and texture at different scales and perspectives.
The rich texture of the unprimed surface of Flattop only adds to the raw, primal immediacy of Bradley’s abstract color blocks, which issue forth from the gritty world of its dirt-smeared background. Left to linger on the studio floor where it acquires the dirt and debris of Bradley’s process, adds a gritty quality to the otherwise elegant simplicity of Bradley’s work. He recalls: “I work on them flat. I walk on them. They pick up paint and whatever else is on the floor. I like them to look really filthy” (J. Bradley, quoted in R. Simonini, “Joe Bradley,” The Believer, November-December 2012). There is an audacious, brawny virtuosity to Bradley’s work that he shares with Jackson Pollock; as the art critic Brian Boucher relates: “This rough treatment only adds to the allure” (B. Boucher, “Joe Bradley,” Art in America, March 2011). As Bradley himself explained to The Brooklyn Rail, “Unprimed canvas looks like paper in a way; to me, it looks like newsprint. …when you have a primed surface, the paint just kind of skates across the surface, and the brushstroke, the mark, just kind of stands up, in a way. But when you’re working on unprimed canvas, it’s sort of—you’re almost etching into the surface” (J. Bradley, quoted in P. Bui, “Art in Conversation: Joe Bradley with Phong Bui,” Brooklyn Rail, February 3, 2011). The canvas is always left unprimed, the palette deliberately reduced and spare, the brush-marks obvious and straightforward. Above all else, Bradley’s paintings maintain a strict honesty and a truth-to-materials. His work never pretends or imitates, but rather insists on the materials of their creation. His expressionistic paintings insist only on the gesture of the artist and the application of paint on canvas.
Obtaining the all-over glow of color and paint accumulation requires time and patience, in spite of the apparent haste with which it appears Bradley’s painting specifically and abstract painting, in general, seem to have been made. His process is actually much slower and more deliberate than it may seem. As Bradley recently described in a 2015 interview for The Paris Review: “There’s a lot of just sitting and looking and thinking. Then I’ll make a move every once and awhile” (J. Bradley, quoted in S. LaCava, “Studio Visit: Joe Bradley,” The Paris Review, February 22, 2011, via https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/02/22/joe-bradley/). He elaborated to Laura Hoptman, cuator of Painting and Drawing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, “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 twentieth-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, May 16, 2013, via https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/joe-bradley/). Another important part of his process is the amount of time that Bradley spends looking at the work of other artists, a meditative process that allows him to more fully engage with his own paintings. “I think that painting relates very neatly to inner travel and the exploration of inner worlds. 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” (Ibid.).
Flattop tackles the legacy of a series of inspired references—the expressionist, all-over canvases of the New York School. Like his predecessor Jackson Pollock, Bradley dismantles the hierarchy of painting, taking it off the wall and placing it onto the floor, where his abstract style has time to develop at its own pace. Indeed, even for the viewer, looking at Bradley’s intricate, abstracted world, the eye is forced to slowly wander around the canvas surface, its effect not unlike walking a labyrinth in its slow, deliberately meditative space.
Every inch of Joe Bradley’s monumental painting, Flattop, is activated with the artist’s signature marks. The artist begins each painting with a swath of raw, un-stretched canvas placed directly on the floor. In this position, the canvas absorbs a patina of marks, including the dirt, dust and stains from previous use, coalescing into a layer of what the artist calls schmutz. “I usually have some kind of source material to work off of—a drawing or a found image—but this ends up getting buried in the process,” he explains. “Most of the painting happens on the floor; then I’ll pin them up periodically to see what they look like on the wall. I work on both sides of the painting too. If one side starts to feel unmanageable, I’ll turn it over and screw around with the other side... because I am working on unprepared canvas, I get this bleed through. The oil paint will bleed through to the other side, so I get this sort of incidental mark” (J. Bradley, quoted in R. Simonini, “Joe Bradley,” Believer, July 2012, p. 65). As such the final direction of the canvas isn’t completely determined until the painting is actually finished. In Flattop, after the painted marks had been achieved, Bradley paints squares of bright yellow, flame orange, and earthy brown and a long line of cerulean blue, all colors featured on smaller scale throughout the canvas. Thus, the canvas becomes a conversation about color and texture at different scales and perspectives.
The rich texture of the unprimed surface of Flattop only adds to the raw, primal immediacy of Bradley’s abstract color blocks, which issue forth from the gritty world of its dirt-smeared background. Left to linger on the studio floor where it acquires the dirt and debris of Bradley’s process, adds a gritty quality to the otherwise elegant simplicity of Bradley’s work. He recalls: “I work on them flat. I walk on them. They pick up paint and whatever else is on the floor. I like them to look really filthy” (J. Bradley, quoted in R. Simonini, “Joe Bradley,” The Believer, November-December 2012). There is an audacious, brawny virtuosity to Bradley’s work that he shares with Jackson Pollock; as the art critic Brian Boucher relates: “This rough treatment only adds to the allure” (B. Boucher, “Joe Bradley,” Art in America, March 2011). As Bradley himself explained to The Brooklyn Rail, “Unprimed canvas looks like paper in a way; to me, it looks like newsprint. …when you have a primed surface, the paint just kind of skates across the surface, and the brushstroke, the mark, just kind of stands up, in a way. But when you’re working on unprimed canvas, it’s sort of—you’re almost etching into the surface” (J. Bradley, quoted in P. Bui, “Art in Conversation: Joe Bradley with Phong Bui,” Brooklyn Rail, February 3, 2011). The canvas is always left unprimed, the palette deliberately reduced and spare, the brush-marks obvious and straightforward. Above all else, Bradley’s paintings maintain a strict honesty and a truth-to-materials. His work never pretends or imitates, but rather insists on the materials of their creation. His expressionistic paintings insist only on the gesture of the artist and the application of paint on canvas.
Obtaining the all-over glow of color and paint accumulation requires time and patience, in spite of the apparent haste with which it appears Bradley’s painting specifically and abstract painting, in general, seem to have been made. His process is actually much slower and more deliberate than it may seem. As Bradley recently described in a 2015 interview for The Paris Review: “There’s a lot of just sitting and looking and thinking. Then I’ll make a move every once and awhile” (J. Bradley, quoted in S. LaCava, “Studio Visit: Joe Bradley,” The Paris Review, February 22, 2011, via https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/02/22/joe-bradley/). He elaborated to Laura Hoptman, cuator of Painting and Drawing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, “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 twentieth-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, May 16, 2013, via https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/joe-bradley/). Another important part of his process is the amount of time that Bradley spends looking at the work of other artists, a meditative process that allows him to more fully engage with his own paintings. “I think that painting relates very neatly to inner travel and the exploration of inner worlds. 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” (Ibid.).
Flattop tackles the legacy of a series of inspired references—the expressionist, all-over canvases of the New York School. Like his predecessor Jackson Pollock, Bradley dismantles the hierarchy of painting, taking it off the wall and placing it onto the floor, where his abstract style has time to develop at its own pace. Indeed, even for the viewer, looking at Bradley’s intricate, abstracted world, the eye is forced to slowly wander around the canvas surface, its effect not unlike walking a labyrinth in its slow, deliberately meditative space.