Joe Bradley

the long version

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.