Joe Bradley
Joe Bradley ‘Vanguard’ 2018. This is a work by Bradley that I like a lot. The colors and iconic shapes are killing it here.
I’m trying to understand the recent wave of abstract expressionism better. This is a movement that at its core hasn’t changed very much since Pollock dripped his way into American culture in the 1940s. Arguably, the artwork has improved, I’d rather live with a piece like Bradley’s work above than a Pollock. But other than a refining design sense, how has this movement evolved from Pollock and Frankenthaler to artists like Bradley today?
Art is a vast word that can mean just about anything a person puts their mind to. Sculpture and painting have been bundled together separately from writing and music and everything else because the two groups are visual representations of something. They don’t perform a function like architecture or industrial design. The bomb that went off when Duchamp said that a urinal was an art piece was because for the first time someone was actively saying that this art is a philisophical idea and that the urinal represented this conceptual art. The importance of Pollock was the idea that a painting could represent something more than the painting… the painting was an action, a crazy man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth splatting house paint at a canvas rolled out on the floor. In my opinion, the work of Pollock was monumentally important, but its kind of ugly as well… its not something I would want to ponder as an object outside of its important historical significance.
The way I see Abstract Expressionism is by ‘age’:
Pre Abstract Expressionist:
Gorky: for his style
Hoffmann: for his theory
First Generation:
Pollock: First acknowledged representative of the movement
De Kooning: He is mixed in because of his mark making, but I could argue he is not part of the group
Rothko, Newman, Still: First power house artists who represented a new contemplative style that became what this movement has been primarily about
Second Generation:
Mitchell, Frankenthaler, Francis: Artists influenced by and continuing the contemplative work of Rothko and mark making of De Kooning
Post-Abstract Expressionist
Motherwell, Twombly, Marden: minimalist, mark making, philisophical art
Neo-Abstract Expressionist:
Joe Bradley, Laura Owens, 100000 other current artists
… (work in progress)
What I appreciate most is that these works often feel like an artist living with a painting and making adjustments over time until it resolves into its final form.
Some pieces in this movement resonate strongly with me. Overall, the movement has grown more mature compared with its early days, when artists such as Frankenthaler and Pollock practiced a more stream-of-consciousness form of expressionism.
Joe Bradley at David Zwirner wasn’t an artist I’d fully followed before. Zwirner is a top-tier gallery with a large collector base, and Bradley is operating on a significant stage. I spent some time trying to understand why. I liked how in the interview he said “The sitting to painting ratio is appalling” by which he means he spends a lot of time contemplating and being with the work.
My question is: is this good art? Is there anything new here, and can I learn anything from it?
Right now the work feels foreign to me. When I look at images of Bradley’s paintings, I see large blocks of primary (or near primary) color layered into compositions that can hold a room. I can imagine the mood of a single canvas changing the atmosphere of a space. Part of what I’m responding to is close to what I’d call “environmental” effect work that functions almost like design in how it establishes a sense of place, but with painting’s physicality and ambiguity.
Joe Bradley ‘Moksha’ 2021
There are some old videos and shows of Bradley online that I personally am not a big fan of. You cant early work against anybody… but why I’m calling out the earlier pieces of his above, is they kind of directly relate to his current best work. When I think Bradley does a great job, I think his paintings relate easily to icons. These early drawings and paintings were very icon oriented.