Joe Bradley

Joe Bradley is a contemporary American artist, whose protean practice embraces a wide variety of mediums, techniques and styles.

His works often evoke seminal precedents, such as Colour Field painting and Abstract Expressionism; an homage as tongue-in-cheek as it is earnest and often interpreted as a wry riposte to shifting trends.

Born in 1975 in Kittery, Maine, Bradley earned his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). In 1999, he moved to New York, becoming lead singer for the band Cheeseburger, whose modest success includes a theme for the video game Grand Theft Auto.

Bradley’s first solo exhibition was held at Boston’s Allston Skirt Gallery in 2002. His New York debut came the following year, at Kenny Schachter’s famed West Village project space. Bradley later described the exhibition as ‘my Rosetta Stone.’

For his first institutional exhibition, at MoMA PS1 in 2006, he showed modular, Minimalist-inspired monochrome canvases arranged into blockish figures. These so-called 'robot paintings' gained him critical attention, and he exhibited them again at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. An untitled example from that year sold above estimate in Christie’s in 2020 for $112,500.

Bradley’s 2008–09 Schmagoo series, meanwhile — grease-pencil on canvas ‘paintings’ that combined his childhood fascination for comics with his drawing practice — attempted to demolish the distinction between comics and paintings. When first exhibited in New York in 2008, the works were described by the gallery as 'a waste of time to try to understand and a pleasure to pursue.'

More recently, Bradley has turned to paintings that start out as fragments of unprimed canvas on his studio floor. Over time, the dirt and debris they accumulate merges with his paint marks to form radiant sculptural layers.

Sometimes he cuts and then sews the fragments together, or turns the work over: ‘The nature of the oil paint is that it kind of bleeds through the canvas,’ he has explained: ‘so you have some sort of residual marks seeping through…and influencing the composition.’ In 2015, Tres Hombres almost doubled its estimate to achieve $3,077,000 at Christie’s New York.

In 2014, Bradley was included in The Forever Now, a landmark exhibition of contemporary painting at MoMA, New York. In 2017, Gagosian chose Eric’s Hair as its ‘Oscar show’, for the Thursday before the Academy Awards. His work is held in collections including the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; and the Whitney Museum, New York.