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拍品专文
Berlin Duck #2 is an example of New York-based Joe Bradley’s Foot and Mouth series, which calls into question the relationship between form, color and texture. After his modular monochrome canvases made an impact at the 2008 Whitney Biennial where they were compared to the works of Ellsworth Kelly, Bradley felt as if he were simply assembling canvases, not painting them. As a result, the artist embarked on what are perhaps his most acclaimed bodies of work to date: the Schmagoo paintings and the Foot and Mouth paintings. Both series eschew the minimalist inspired aesthetic he felt trapped by in favor of a style more closely resembling his early influence, Philip Guston. Bradley’s Foot and Mouth paintings at once develop and expand upon the motifs of the Schmagoo and modular monochrome paintings, and then abandon them completely.
The painting itself is striking; it features Bradley’s signature gritty aesthetic, countered by the disarming precision with which he applies his paint and composes the image. The colors of Berlin Duck #2 are spare yet impactful, and possess a sense of depth and volume that hints at the unseen and the subliminal. The upper, dominant layer of ochre obscures all but small vestiges of the rosy reds and pinks that make up the base layer of the painting. In classic Abstract Expressionist fashion, Bradley is as concerned with what is buried and unseen, as he is with what is immediately visible. Berlin Duck #2 is not a painting to be glanced at and moved past. Its complexity invites extended viewing, and Bradley wants it this way. The work has the rare ability to create an instant connection between artist and viewer. It tells the story of Bradley’s hyperactive career thus far, while maintaining a safe distance: Never becoming precious or sentimental.
The present lot reads as a completely abstract painting, yet Bradley insists that he has “no motivation to make an abstract painting, even if [my paintings] sometimes read as abstract” (J. Bradley quoted in L.M Hoptman. 3/29/2013 "Joe Bradley." Interview Magazine, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/joe-bradley#). Indeed, Berlin Duck #2 may come across as non-pictorial, but as Bradley’s paintings assert time and time again, the figurative is always lying dormant in the abstract, waiting to reveal itself. This sentiment harks back to the early canvases that catapulted Bradley to art-stardom in 2008. His modular monochromes were seen alternately as simple geometric arrangements, or as crude humanoid forms, at once starkly futuristic and distinctly primitive. The balance between form and subject, and the supposed lack thereof, has always been central to Bradley’s practice. Bradley’s monochromes and his Foot and Mouth paintings utter the same words and phrases, but in distinctly different tongues.
The language of Berlin Duck #2 is the same one spoken by its spiritual forbearers, de Kooning, Guston, Motherwell, and Hofmann; all painters who walked the line between the figurative and the abstract with direction and clarity. Berlin Duck #2 contains traces of Hofmann’s mastery of composition and color relationships, de Kooning’s career-long fascination with subject matter and the erasure thereof, early Guston’s impassioned and unbridled fervor, and Motherwell’s almost audible rhythm and sense of movement. While sharing elements with that which came before it, Berlin Duck #2 has a quality entirely its own. It is also indicative of Bradley’s evolution from post-painterly to painterly abstraction: It retains both the islands of color and their conversations with one another, a hallmark carried over from his modular monochromes, and the scrawled, urgent hieroglyphs of his Schmagoo series. Bradley, unlike most of the great painterly heroes before him, has not evolved linearly, but rather circularly: His various visual avenues taking root in and radiating outward from a unifying conceptual nucleus.
The painting itself is striking; it features Bradley’s signature gritty aesthetic, countered by the disarming precision with which he applies his paint and composes the image. The colors of Berlin Duck #2 are spare yet impactful, and possess a sense of depth and volume that hints at the unseen and the subliminal. The upper, dominant layer of ochre obscures all but small vestiges of the rosy reds and pinks that make up the base layer of the painting. In classic Abstract Expressionist fashion, Bradley is as concerned with what is buried and unseen, as he is with what is immediately visible. Berlin Duck #2 is not a painting to be glanced at and moved past. Its complexity invites extended viewing, and Bradley wants it this way. The work has the rare ability to create an instant connection between artist and viewer. It tells the story of Bradley’s hyperactive career thus far, while maintaining a safe distance: Never becoming precious or sentimental.
The present lot reads as a completely abstract painting, yet Bradley insists that he has “no motivation to make an abstract painting, even if [my paintings] sometimes read as abstract” (J. Bradley quoted in L.M Hoptman. 3/29/2013 "Joe Bradley." Interview Magazine, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/joe-bradley#). Indeed, Berlin Duck #2 may come across as non-pictorial, but as Bradley’s paintings assert time and time again, the figurative is always lying dormant in the abstract, waiting to reveal itself. This sentiment harks back to the early canvases that catapulted Bradley to art-stardom in 2008. His modular monochromes were seen alternately as simple geometric arrangements, or as crude humanoid forms, at once starkly futuristic and distinctly primitive. The balance between form and subject, and the supposed lack thereof, has always been central to Bradley’s practice. Bradley’s monochromes and his Foot and Mouth paintings utter the same words and phrases, but in distinctly different tongues.
The language of Berlin Duck #2 is the same one spoken by its spiritual forbearers, de Kooning, Guston, Motherwell, and Hofmann; all painters who walked the line between the figurative and the abstract with direction and clarity. Berlin Duck #2 contains traces of Hofmann’s mastery of composition and color relationships, de Kooning’s career-long fascination with subject matter and the erasure thereof, early Guston’s impassioned and unbridled fervor, and Motherwell’s almost audible rhythm and sense of movement. While sharing elements with that which came before it, Berlin Duck #2 has a quality entirely its own. It is also indicative of Bradley’s evolution from post-painterly to painterly abstraction: It retains both the islands of color and their conversations with one another, a hallmark carried over from his modular monochromes, and the scrawled, urgent hieroglyphs of his Schmagoo series. Bradley, unlike most of the great painterly heroes before him, has not evolved linearly, but rather circularly: His various visual avenues taking root in and radiating outward from a unifying conceptual nucleus.