(Waltham, Mass.) – The Rose Art Museum presents the first large-scale exhibition in North America devoted to the work of celebrated New York-based artist Joe Bradley, October 15, 2017 – January 28, 2018. An artist known for a diverse body of work, the installation will feature Bradley’s large-scale paintings alongside sketches, drawings, and sculptures. Organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the midcareer survey debuted in Buffalo, NY, this summer. A public opening reception to celebrate the Rose’s fall season will be held from 6–9pm on Saturday, October 14. 

Widely known for his powerful abstract paintings and spontaneous drawings, Bradley (b. 1975, Kittery, Maine) has distinguished himself among the artists of his generation with his mutable approach to artmaking, strategically creating bodies of work that seem both at odds with one another and, at the same time, develop a broad, fascinating oeuvre. Bradley works in series, pivoting between abstraction and figuration, the earnest and the comic, wielding a range of techniques that draw upon his profound appreciation for the history of modern painting as well as underground comics and outdated periodicals. 

This exhibition features some two-dozen paintings, including modular color-field paintings, grease-pencil drawings on canvas, and densely layered expressionistic abstract canvases that record the detritus and spontaneity of the studio environment. These works will be placed in context alongside numerous examples of Bradley’s engaging and intimate works on paper and his recent experiments with sculpture, ranging from minimalistic floor-based works to figurative bronzes based on found amateur sculptures. 

“Throughout his career, Joe Bradley has inspired many a double take—“This is a Joe Bradley?” viewers have exclaimed in museums, art fairs, galleries, and collectors’ homes,” says Albright-Knox’s chief curator Cathleen Chaffee, who organized the exhibition. “Even dedicated fans of his work have inevitably faltered at one or another of his forking paths over the past twenty years, while Bradley, on the other hand, shifts gears without pause: from starkly minimalist to gestural abstract paintings with stops in between, from discomfiting assemblage sculptures to boldly graphic silkscreens, and from jagged, sometimes comic drawings to obdurate geometric sculptures. The occasion of the artist’s survey exhibition, Bradley’s first in an American museum, seems the right moment to place these divergent stylistic approaches in context, and to suggest some of their conceptual connective tissue.”

According to former Rose Curator Kim Conaty, who organized the exhibition for the Rose, “Painting, for Bradley, is a problem-solving practice. Throughout his career, Bradley has continued to wrestle with a number of fundamental painterly questions: how painting relates to its material support, how to deal with color on that support, and how to confront abstraction and figuration within the same field. Even as he has shifted course in his practice from one series to the next, these essential questions have remained at the core, and he hasn’t settled on any answers yet.” 

As Bradley has mused: “I think that time moves slower in painting. And maybe that accounts for a lot of the anxiety around painting in the last forty or fifty years. You have the twentieth century wrapping up and everything is moving at this breakneck speed? And then, painting is still walking. It’s just a very human activity that takes time.” 

In conjunction with the exhibition in the Foster Wing, Bradley was invited to explore the Rose Collection and to choose a group of works from the museum’s renowned holdings for an innovative display titled Buckdancer’s Choice: Joe Bradley Selects. Spanning more than a century, Bradley’s selection presents a range of approaches to painting and sculpture, emphasizing materials and how artists use them while ruminating on themes of figuration and abstraction. The installation features works by Carl Andre, Paul Gauguin, John Graham, Philip Guston, Marisol, and Claes Oldenburg, among others, and will elicit some unexpected resonances and reverberations with Bradley’s own work. 

The exhibition, organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY, is accompanied by a major publication, featuring essays on Bradley’s painting and drawing, by Chaffee, Conaty, and independent curator and scholar Dan Nadel, and a new interview between Bradley and artist Carroll Dunham.

ABOUT THE ARTIST 

Bradley was born in 1975 in Kittery, Maine, and began drawing from a young age. At the B.F.A. program at Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1990s, Bradley discovered art history and started devouring paintings from the 1960s and 1970s by the Chicago Imagists and Philip Guston, the spontaneous drawings of A. R. Penck and Cy Twombly, and the heavily layered nineteenth-century landscapes of Albert Pinkham Ryder. While still a student in Providence, he had his first gallery exhibition at Boston’s Allston Skirt Gallery in 2000. 

Since that time, Bradley has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, including a solo museum exhibition at Le Consortium, Dijon, in 2014, and group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; MoMA P.S.1, Queens, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany, among several other venues. He lives and works in New York.

ABOUT THE ROSE ART MUSEUM AT BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY

Founded in 1961, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University is among the nation’s premier university museums dedicated to collecting, preserving, exhibiting, and interpreting modern and contemporary art. A center of cultural and intellectual life on campus, the Museum serves as a catalyst for the exchange of ideas–a place of discovery, intersection, and dialogue at the university and within the Greater Boston community. Through its collection, exhibitions, and programs, the Rose works to affirm and advance the values of social justice, freedom of expression, global diversity, and academic excellence that are hallmarks of Brandeis University. Postwar American and international contemporary art are particularly well represented within the Rose’s renowned permanent collection of more than 9,000 objects.

Located on Brandeis University’s campus at 415 South Street, Waltham, MA, the museum is free and open to the public Wednesday through Sunday, 11 AM – 5 PM. 

For more information, visit www.brandeis.edu/rose or call 781-736-3434.