Joe Bradley

American painter Joe Bradley has distinguished himself among the artists of his generation with his mutable approach to art-making. With minimal fuss, Bradley works in series, picking up and discarding styles and oscillating between abstraction and figuration as it suits him. “A retrospective of his work would look like a group show,” wrote dealer and collector Kenny Schachter. Bradley’s first large-scale North American exhibition supports this observation: he is shown moving from expressionistic canvases that record the detritus and spontaneity of the studio environment to subtly figurative send-ups of Minimalist painting, then to starkly primitivistic glyphs drawn in grease pencil on unprimed canvas, followed by modular aluminum sculptures paired with textual directives.
This richly illustrated catalog, published to accompany Bradley’s midcareer survey organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, presents the full range of Bradley’s unique approach to language, abstraction and the evolutions of style. Joe Bradley includes reproductions of all works in the exhibition—some 30 paintings, 8 sculptures and 30 drawings—as well as an introductory essay by exhibition organizer Cathleen Chaffee, new scholarly essays, an interview with the artist and an exhibition history.

One of the standard-bearers of the polarizing, hard-to-categorize group of contemporary painters that includes such artists as Mark Grotjahn, Nicole Eisenmann, Richard Aldrich, Josh Smith and Michael Williams, Joe Bradley (born 1975) is widely known for his bright abstract paintings and glyph-like drawings.