Joe Bradley: Paintings
Allston Skirt Gallery, Boston
March 1 - 30, 2002
Allston Skirt Gallery presents the first solo exhibition of paintings by Joe Bradley, a New York-based painter whose work was first seen in Boston in January 2000 in Allston Skirt’s exhibition "Here Comes Rhody," curated by Dike Blair and featuring a selection of artists who were, at that time, just about to receive undergraduate degrees from the from Rhode Island School of Design.
In this new group of paintings, Joe Bradley has created a collection of wonderfully romantic scenes that include seascapes, mountain views, and ramshackle piers, continuing his examination of the wide world of landscape painting. On first glance, his expressively painted canvases recall the work of a Sunday painter or an untrained artist, as Joe Bradley captures the sun glinting off the water with a few blobs of thick pink and white paint, or the grandeur of a mountain range by way of blurred blue and green streaks. Yet these swift gestures are intentional references to the picture postcards, folk art, yard sale canvases, and cheesy snapshots that Bradley loves, as well as to the sophisticated abstraction found in the landscapes of fine painters from John Marin to Alex Katz. Joe Bradley paints with wit and facility, confidently walking the thin line between the trite, Sunday painter’s representation of a magnificent sunset or copy of an exotic travel postcard, and the sophisticated vocabulary of contemporary abstraction -- in some cases, the work becomes almost entirely abstract. Bradley’s love of his medium is apparent in these works, and his rich experimentation with brushwork and gesture has a freshness and sincerity to it, even while his subject matter reveals his fascination with some very cliched forms of representation.
ALLSTON SKIRT GALLERY
450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02118
www.allstonskirt.com
