Joe Bradley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
Please see the discussion on the talk page. |
Joe Bradley (born 1975 in Maine, US) is artist based in New York.
Bradley received his BA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design [1] in 1999.
His work has appeared in a number of exhibitions such as “Axis of Practice” at Midway Contemporary Art[2] in Minneapolis, “Searching For Love and Fire” at David Castillo Modern & Contemporary Art[3] in Miami and “No Platform, Just A Trampoline” at Marcus Ritter Gallery in New York. Bradley has shown internationally at galleries such as Galeria Comercial[4] in Puerto Rico, Greener Pastures Gallery[5] in Toronto and the Saatchi Gallery [6] in London. He is represented by CANADA[7] in New York.
Joe Bradley does figurative paintings by building them piece-meal from abstract single-colour canvases; however, Bradley’s take on colour-field painting is less than masterful, utilising pre-built craft shop canvases speedily daubed with bright acrylic colour. There is something intrinsically funny about Bradley’s Space Invaders style figures, incredibly simple representations of bodies constructed from differently proportioned rectangles. Much like the way in which 70s and 80s computer programmers sought to depict the 3D world with the limited tools at their disposal – a selection of basic polygons – Bradley uses his feeble canvases to test the limits of the human desire and ability to anthropomorphise almost anything. People like to see a spark of life, identification, or simple similarity in their surroundings, no matter how un-human or un-natural the form, and Bradley brings this longing for recognition – along with its attendant warmth and humour – to bear on an area of art that is viewed alternately as cold and calculated or wildly theatrical, grand and sombre.
