Joe Bradley

Peres Projects, Berlin

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2010

Berlin, Peres Projects, Joe Bradley: Freeks, 2010

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The canvas tension is slightly loose and undulates in places where the paint is thickest. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Joe Bradley is a New York-based painter with a seditious, eclectic, and highly varied style. Erased Freek is an engaging work, imbued with a sense of tension between erasure and mark-making, and executed with deference to art historical precedent.

As Bradley’s style has morphed between monochromes, minimalist modular compositions, and large abstracts such as the present work, perhaps the only constant has been an emphasis on process. He has described his approach to works such as Erased Freek: “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. That was something that just happened out of being a frugal guy, I guess. But then, because I am working on unprepared canvas, I get this bleed-through… I get this incidental mark… the idea is to end up with something that is unrecognizable. I don’t like to look at a painting and be able to retrace the steps” (Joe Bradley in conversation with Ross Simonini, The Believer, November / December 2012, pp. 65-68).

Bradley’s praxis is loaded with art-historical reference. In his words: “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” (Joe Bradley in conversation with Laura Hoptman, Interview, 16^th May 2013, online resource). This is certainly true of Erased Freek: the grid-like structure and use of spray-paint is redolent of Jean-Michel Basquiat; the sense of linear, haptic, messy depiction seems to denote the influence of Jean Dubuffet; and the all-over composition, arranged with no clear axis or orientation and punctuated with flecks of multiple colours, recalls the abstract approach of Cy Twombly. Baselitz is an acknowledged influence of Bradley, and monographs of the German artist litter his studio. However, as heralded in the title, the present work seems to be more about erasure than mark-making; slugs of spray-paint have been visibly whited out, and many of the lines appear only as strips of faint oily residue. One cannot help but recall Robert Rauschenberg’s seminal Erased de Kooning Drawing of 1953, which now resides in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The present work also presents an insight into the development of Bradley’s extraordinarily varied oeuvre. Created for his 2010 show at Peres Projects in Berlin, it seems a notable departure from his earlier Shmagoo series, which favoured a blank linear cave-painting inspired manner. Moreover, in the quickening and loosening of his mark-making, and in the burgeoning accretions of colour and dirt that abound across the picture plane, we can sense the nascent beginnings of a style that he has favoured in ensuing years, which appears more closely related to Colour Field painting and Abstract Expressionism.