Marley Freeman @ Karma Gallery, NYC - "no when" Exhibition

Marley Freeman: no when

Karma Gallery, New York

Through July 18, 2025

no when presents a selection of intuitively generated and yet tightly composed paintings by Marley Freeman made in the past two years. The artist found her way to painting through a deep knowledge of pattern, texture, and color cultivated during early experiences with mosaic and textile production—the latter at her family business and then an archive connected to a jacquard and dobby mill. Building on the resulting knowledge that flat media have their own architectures, Freeman’s recent oil and acrylic paintings are at once process-based and concerned with the structural qualities of two-dimensionality. These works are driven by her investigation into, as the artist puts it, “how abstractions can act like images.”

Working simultaneously across an array of sizes in her studios in New York and Sheffield, Massachusetts, she moves fluidly from canvas to canvas. The viewer’s movements through the gallery spaces of no when echo this dance: intimate, jewel-like canvases pull us in  close, while larger, sweeping compositions reward another kind of embodied looking. Each work is both question and answer; she resolves her initial marks in a process of painterly call and response that takes place over the course of months. Augmented with passes of transparent, thinned-out oil, early layers of acrylic are nonetheless visible on the surface, like the warp threads that undergird every woven textile.

Despite her hand’s evidence in each composition, Marley Freeman’s paintings are not purely expressive. She also conceives of them as images, built up from an initial mark into whole visual systems. Though every stroke in give this sea a name (2024) is brushy, the transparency of Freeman’s oil allows them to intermingle, each color reacting to what is beside and beneath it. Hot pinks and turquoises distributed all over the surface are set off by ochres as the varied marks coalesce. Like Chicago Imagist Barbara Rossi, with whom Marley Freeman studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the younger artist allows visual stimuli of all kinds to seep into her paintings, rendering them resolutely non-hierarchical. The lyrical forms of sublimely unempathetic (2025) evoke the Imagist’s tradition of off-kilter representation, but Freeman layers them into an abstract composition that verges on pattern while never actually repeating itself. Alongside textiles and twentieth-century painters, she looks to the old masters—Giotto, for the way his pastel tones set off his famous blue at Padua; El Greco, for his ability to create a mood through hue—in her conception of palette as a wordless conduit for the expression of emotional states.

For years, Marley Freeman has collaborated with friends such as Lukas Geronimas and Jared Buckhiester, relating to one another through making together. Freeman’s paintings shell crater with flowers, nocturnal encounter with a lunatic, and dead century in the trench (all 2025) are ringed with ceramics created by Buckhiester and framed in metal forms hewn by Geronimas. Her titles, borrowed from artists and writers like Otto Dix, Bernadette Mayer, Agnes Martin, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Susan Howe (the show is titled after a line from one of her poems), also evince the importance of engaging with the creations of others. “The only way to work through ideas,” she says, “is to paint through them.” Conspiring with other artists and with material and image histories alike, Marley Freeman paints her way through and arrives on the other side, creating one continuous fabric of entwined colors, forms, and references. Unlike textiles, however, her paintings are liberated from the constraints of functionality. Here, she finds the freedom to improvise.

KARMA

549 West 26th Street, New York City

karmakarma.org

Marley Freeman: no when

Karma Gallery, New York City, May 29 – July 18, 2025

Artist Ulala Imai @ Karma, NYC - "CALM" Exhibition of new paintings

Ulala Imai: CALM

Karma, New York

January 16 – February 22, 2025

Karma presents CALM, an exhibition of new paintings by ULALA IMAI, at 549 West 26th Street, New York.

“I paint works just like I make my daily meals,” says Ulala Imai, describing the quotidian and ritualistic nature of her nearly two-decade-long practice. Working from the home outside Tokyo that she shares with her partner and their three children, Imai arranges the contents of her immediate environment into discrete, self-contained universes within her paintings. With confident, unbroken brushstrokes, she imbues the objects that surround her and her family with an animating light, transforming them into a ragtag cast of characters. In CALM, Imai’s protagonists leave their familiar domestic realm behind and embark on a journey out into the unknown. 

In some of Imai’s recent paintings, teddy bears stand with quiet resolve in rustic landscapes. The wall-spanning diptych Lost (2024) places two of Imai’s bears in the aftermath of the magnitude 7.5 earthquake on Japan’s Noto Peninsula that threw the contents of the ocean floor onto the coastline. The artist depicts this threatened landscape in jagged, almost Cubist shapes; light bounces off the planar sides of stones and trickles through the quivering needles on a pine tree. The beady eyes of the two central figures telescope their simultaneous shock and brave determination to find their way home. Wind tousles the fur of the bear at the center of Atlantis (2024), suggesting its movement through the rocky landscape. Imai’s solvent-thinned oil paint endows each of her subjects with a glowing, translucent aura. “In her world,” writes Hiji Nam, “every object seems illuminated and alive—the snow, the light, the wind, the toys, and the grass sentient as if animated by an interconnected world soul.” Two landscapes devoid of characters, Holy Night and Calm (both 2024), focus on moments of luminosity in her backyard—a moon peeking through the trees, snow reflecting the sun.

Back inside of her home, Ulala Imai groups figures from a familiar crew of characters into tightly-composed relational ensembles. Works like Party (2024), where an array of toys pose together, appearing to stare directly out at the viewer, take cues from group portraits like Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) and Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632). Imai’s use of her own domestic space, however, upends the masculinist associations of the royal court and the academy. Green Gables (2023), a painting of a dollhouse depicted with Imai’s simultaneously flat and layered approach to color, allegorizes the domestic space that is the site and subject of her practice. This house-within-a-house, which has appeared in a number of her canvases, engages the long art historical tradition of dollhouses as metaphors for the space of the mind—Laurie Simmons, Florine Stettheimer, Robert Gober, and Mike Kelley have all used the miniature dwellings as metaphors for psychic interiority. 

In works like Border and Play (both 2024), Imai’s visible strokes come together to suggest something hyperreal. These intimate tableaux evoke the still lifes of Edouard Manet, whose 1880 image of a bunch of white asparagus remains a pivotal touchstone for Ulala Imai. Her vision of mundane domestic life is one of beauty and light, of a space where making a still life becomes an opportunity for reflection. With the same slow clarity that she brings to the preparation of her daily meals, Imai records the precious revelations of the everyday.

KARMA

549 West 26th Street, New York City

karmakarma.org

Verne Dawson Exhibition @ Karma, NYC - "Crystal Springs" Exhibition + Monograph Publication

Verne Dawson: Crystal Springs

Karma, New York

January 8 – February 28, 2025

Karma presents Crystal Springs, an exhibition of new paintings by VERNE DAWSON on view at 22 East 2nd Street, New York.

Verne Dawson’s recent paintings center around a spring near the artist’s home in the Blue Ridge Mountains in western North Carolina. As depicted by Dawson, whose approach, unmediated by contemporary technology, foregrounds the primacy of subject, artist, and paint, the spring becomes a place outside of time, at once enchanted and very real.

In Karma’s new monograph on Verne Dawson, critic Jennifer Krasinski hones in on the artist’s atemporal ambitions, writing that “he devoted himself to painting because it offers ‘the much-desired possibility to escape time,’ eluding the dupe finitudes (like now and then) and instead calling attention . . . to time’s suppleness.” His monumental canvas Saluda Crystal Springs (2025) invites the viewer to step into the utopic spaces of the spring and painting itself. While the location is specific, the temporality is an open question. Across nearly fourteen feet, swaths of oil swirl and curlicue, together forming a fantastical landscape populated by a number of nude figures in pairs—without clothes to ground us in a particular era, we are further dislocated from time. Vines snake up trees; the waters are vibrantly blue and yellow; the sun bounces off of the top of a distant mountain. As in the monumental landscape paintings from the Song and Yuan dynasties that are among Dawson’s wide-ranging inspirations, the artist hopes to emphasize humans’ diminutive scale in the face of expansive nature. 

The calligraphically forested Pot Shoals (2024) focuses on one couple as they wade through the springs’ clear water, its aquamarine hue mirrored in the sky above. In the dense trees that frame them, Dawson’s use of the complementary colors orange and green creates a firework-like pop of leaves and vines. Through the Forest (2024) represents a procession of figures walking down to the waters in a style that borders on abstraction; clouds and trees billow above and around them in elemental, gestural whorls redolent of Abstract Expressionism. Through his impassioned renderings of the Crystal Springs, Dawson channels a love of nature and a respect for our place in it.

In the rear gallery, the trompe-l’œil Steampunk (2015/2024) bridges Verne Dawson’s enveloping, out-of-time paintings of the springs with a selection of smaller works of urban and technological subjects—21st Street (2015), Friday Night (2024), and Bi-Plane (2013). A painting of a painting of a jet and a biplane flying over a verdant forest encircled by a stream, Steampunk comments at once on the asynchronicity of modern life and the constructed nature of Dawson’s medium. A painted Post-it note inscribed with the work’s title beside the canvas at the center of the composition pulls the viewer out of the fantasy of painting as a portal into another world, returning them to the reality of the present.

Verne Dawson

To hear a story to its end

Texts by by Jennifer Krasinski, 

Deborah Solomon, Verne Dawson

Karma, New York, 2025

384 pages, 10 1⁄4 × 11 in.

KARMA

22 East 2nd Street, New York City

karmakarma.org

Tabboo! Early Works @ Karma & Gordon Robichaux, New York

Tabboo!

Early Works

Karma, New York

Gordon Robichaux, New York

January 8/12 – February 28, 2025

Karma and Gordon Robichaux present Early Works, an multisite exhibition by Tabboo! on view in New York at 172 and 188 East 2nd Street, and 41 Union Square West, respectively. On view at both galleries through February 28, 2025, Early Works opens on January 8 at Karma and January 12 at Gordon Robichaux. 

In the summer of 1982, Tabboo! arrived in New York City. Against a backdrop of Neo-Expressionism, Pictures postmodernism, graffiti, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Tabboo! developed an aesthetic universe of painting, performance, and text that would become foundational to the city’s new avant garde and its rearticulation in popular culture at large. His early work emerged from a collision of his longstanding interests—1960s psychedelia, pop divas, the black-and-white drawings of Aubrey Beardsley—and the downtown queer art scene he became an integral part of, alongside fellow Boston School friends such as Jack Pierson, Mark Morrisroe, and Pat Hearn. Over the course of the next decade, he would create exuberant paintings and works on paper; produce flyers and backdrops for now-legendary East Village venues like Pyramid Club, where he also performed; make a glitter-soaked banner for the pioneering drag festival Wigstock; and design lettering for the covers of dance group Deee-lite’s smash single “Groove is in the Heart” and album World Clique. 

Text—rendered in his idiosyncratic calligraphic script—connects decades of Tabboo!’s work across media. He developed his signature lettering, characterized by its spiraling, curvilinear details, in reaction to the predominance of hard-edged, sans-serif fonts that dominated the visual culture of the early 1980s. Letters pirouette and curlicue across supports ranging from paper to textiles, gelatin silver prints to wood. His spirals extend and repeat beyond their linguistic tethers, forming borders reminiscent of Greek keys—known as meanders—around images or multiplying across the surfaces of works. Darkly witty and abundant with references to the era’s underground culture, Tabboo!’s writing appears on flyers for club nights, tarot cards, and advertisements for local boutiques like Fiorucci and Patricia Field; in speech bubbles that animate his illustrations; and adorning clothing from Willi Smith’s label Williwear, examples of which are on view at Gordon Robichaux. Enacting the performative nature of speech, language in his work variously punctuates, describes, and subverts the visual, with phrases like “sports at the Pyramid: drag racing” accompanying an image of a figure running out of the frame in platform heels. Untitled (tres chic) (1986), created for a Williwear window display, transforms a camp utterance into a wall sculpture that acts as a floating speech bubble for anyone, or any mannequin, who stands beside it. 

The monumental Wigstock Banner (1990) on view at Karma features an array of illustrated queens that meld with the swaths of thinned-out acrylics that interact to create its ground. Painted for the the sixth annual outdoor drag festival organized by the legendary Lady Bunny, the twelve-foot-long canvas invigorates the abstract washes of Color Field painting with an unabashed embrace of neon hues and campy figuration. Many of the looks from his performances in drag, one of which was put to tape 1995’s Wigstock: The Movie, are recorded in a series of drawings that catalogue his numerous personae. Throughout the eighties, Tabboo! used self-portraits, in and out of drag, to explore iterations of his own subjectivity. Drawing equally from the psychological intensity of German expressionism and the camp of popular culture, Tabboo! depicted himself in glasses with stubble and hair standing on end in the impasto-laden Untitled (Self-Portrait) (1982), bewigged and grinning in the Pop-inflected Self-Portrait in Drag as Popcorn (1983), and with a tumbling fall of electric-blue hair in Classical Beauty (1984).

As with his self-portraits, Tabboo! treats his depictions of friends, collaborators, and pop culture heroes with an approach to painting that he would come to call “emotional realism.” He created the gestural, sharpie and housepaint on cardboard Keith Haring (1983) during a live caricature night at the Pyramid Club, paring the artist’s likeness down to simple lines that nonetheless capture his essence. This and works such as Connie Francis at San Janero Festival (1982) and Tammy Wynette (1983), dispense with naturalism, instead communicating affect through the artist’s insistent brushwork, distorted faces, and vibrant palette. Other, more traditionally “realist” paintings, like the still lifes Guido and Vita-Chick (both 1986), introduce perspective and modeling while retaining their emotional charge. 

This survey of Tabboo!’s prescient 1980s output across media attests to his prolific production during his first years in New York. Over the following three decades, his influence—on art, graphic design, fashion, and popular culture—cemented itself as central to the identity of the city he still calls home.

KARMA

188 & 172 East 2nd Street, New York City

karmakarma.org

GORDON ROBICHAUX

41 Union Square West, New York City

www.gordonrobichaux.com

Artist Carole Vanderlinden @ Karma, NYC

Carole Vanderlinden

Karma, New York

November 1 – December 21, 2024

Karma presents Belgian painter Carole Vanderlinden’s debut exhibition in New York.

Carole Vanderlinden’s painting practice is expansive, encompassing what she has called “a mix of genres” to achieve “a coming together of things that shouldn’t mix.” For thirty years, she has worked across collage, drawing, and oils, exploring the syntax of painting through association, intuition, and the act of making itself, as evinced by the oils on view here, made over the course of the last decade. Her titles, which span and sometimes combine numerous languages, point to her imbrication in both semantic and art historical multitudes. 

With innumerable motifs and methods on the table, the fundamental condition of painting—choice—comes to the fore. Deciding on subject and form, she is guided by her mind as much as her hand. As she explains: “The hand is an extension of our thoughts, like an ‘instrument’ physically connected to the painting.” Vanderlinden’s works do not generate stable meanings, legibility, or narrative; rather, they remain autonomous, commenting primarily on the act of putting brush to canvas. Each painting represents, for the artist, a singular, playful way of grappling with the world around her. Rather than objective statements, they are subjective expressions, generated from memories, images, and snatches of detail, unafraid of humor and never wedded to a single approach.

Although Purple house (2023), L’escalier bleu (2023), and Un tour en ville (2023) each depict domestic architectures, what unites them more than the subject matter is Vanderlinden’s embrace of a freedom in painting that allows for experimentation and exploration above all. Melanie Deboutte has written that, in Vanderlinden’s practice, “each element, be it a brushstroke or accidental mark, relates to the rest in complete autonomy and equality,” and in Nature morte (2019), this horizontal relationality manifests metaphorically in her depiction of a tabletop strewn with ambiguous forms, all coexisting on the same plane. Thinking and working slowly, she nondogmatically investigates ways of representing the world in all of its variety. 

 In Paysage tropical (2014), dark, blueish-green paint drips from a verdant array of plant life outlined in the same color, serendipity existing alongside intention—evidence of the artist’s longstanding responsiveness to both chance and materiality. The passage of time is visible on the surface of this painting, gravity slowed down and arrested. The impasto brushwork in Papillon verde (2024) contrasts with the thick black outline delineating a simplified, smiling face topped with a yellow, mustache-shaped toupé. Capharnaüm (2024), its title a French word indicating a disorderly accumulation of objects, knits monstrous visages into a tapestry of colorful swatches. Couple aguerri (2024), a figurative but not naturalistic work built from overlapping and interlocking shapes, imbues the exaggerated geometry of the costumed dancers in Bauhaus choreographer Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet (1922) with a faux-naïve lightheartedness. For Carole Vanderlinden, who ardently believes in the power of her medium, “Painting does not deceive,” but rather, “has the gentle power to unite.”

KARMA

188 East 2nd Street, New York, NY 10009

karmakarma.org

Ouattara Watts @ Karma Gallery, NYC - " ’90s Paintings " Exhibition + Monograph Publication

Ouattara Watts: ’90s Paintings

Karma, New York

November 1 – December 21, 2024

Karma presents ’90s Paintings, the first exhibition to focus on works by Ouattara Watts from that decade. ’90s Paintings is open concurrently with the Currier Museum of Art’s two-person exhibition Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ouattara Watts: A Distant Conversation, on view through February 23, 2025. 

Over the course of the past four decades, Ouattara Watts has created densely layered paintings embedded with a kaleidoscopic range of materials and symbols. In his often-monumental works, numbers, fractals, and otherworldly forms painted by the artist are brought into relation with sacred objects, photographs, and textiles gleaned from flea markets. Watts’s syncretic approach also pulls from his studies of Picasso, Baudelaire, and Surrealism, his African heritage, and his interest in Egyptology, among other cultures from around the world. The five paintings from the 1990s exhibited here are key waypoints in the development of his idiosyncratic artistic language. 

Spurred by a fortuitous 1988 meeting with Jean-Michel Basquiat in Paris, Ouattara Watts, who was then living in the French capital, settled permanently in New York in 1989. In the next ten years, he would be included in the 45th Venice Biennale; receive his first solo museum exhibition, curated by Lawrence Rinder and hosted by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and befriend curator Okwui Enwezor, who wrote in 1995 that Watts was “rewriting and reinscribing the position of African artists in modern art history.” This pivotal decade culminated in an invitation from Enwezor to participate in documenta 11, an iteration of the exhibition now famous for its non-Eurocentric curatorial bent, and his inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, both in 2002.

Pythagor and Thot (1990) was first shown in Watts’s inaugural New York solo presentation, a 1990 outing at Vrej Baghoomian, Inc. in SoHo. In Pythagor and Thot, Anubis, the Egyptian god of the underworld, rides in a boat on a river schematized as black triangles. A lantern lights his way and an ankh, symbolic of eternal life, hangs behind him. The work represents a journey to the underworld and back, like the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and parallels Watts’s two journeys across the Atlantic: the first, when he traveled with Basquiat to New Orleans for the jazz festival and to see the Mississippi River Delta, and the second, when he moved to New York for good. The triangular waves and essentialized forms emerge in part from Watts’s interest in Kazimir Malevich and other European avant-gardists of the early twentieth century, while the nailed-on panel connects Pythagor and Thot to Watts’s other extensions of his canvases into the realm of architecture. 

The triptych Sacred Painting, from the same year, is a prime example of the artist’s sculptural tendency during the 1990s, an approach that led art historian Robert Farris Thompson to deem him “the black architect, the builder of the city of the twenty-first century, a city of reunion, of association, and not of division.” To create the work’s arcing marks, Watts applied paint thickened with leaves to the panels as if building up the facade of an earthen building. A lighter-hued ridge running along the top of Sacred Painting juts out from the picture plane. The monumental work is pierced through with holes, calling attention to its three-dimensionality, while a doorway-shaped cutout invites the viewer to step into the constructed space. Aluminum containers, likely salvaged from New York’s streets, hang from the rightmost panel, while “347,” one of the city’s area codes, is inscribed at the top of the composition. Explaining his sculptural approach to his medium in 1993, Watts said: “If you are born in Africa, sculpture and painting are the same.” For Sacred Painting and other works, the artist found inspiration in not only African architecture but also in the work of Mark Rothko, whose paintings, like Watts’s, draw viewers into their implied depth.

The Dama and Untitled (both 1998), with their earthen mounds that sit on the top edge of the canvas, similarly call on the adobe structures of Ivorian and Sudano-Sahelian architecture. These works, however, are less figurative and hierarchical than his paintings from the turn of the decade, revealing the rhizomatic approach to composition that would come to characterize much of Watts’s practice. In The Dama, a signature Wattsian motif emerges—mound-shaped characters with spiraling, antennae-like protrusions that still appear in his paintings, more than twenty-five years later. The abstract, red-dotted orb at the center of Untitled evokes a celestial sphere, itself a metaphor for the otherworldly constellation of references that cohered in this decade and from which Watts pulls to this day. 

Ouattara Watts

Text by Lawrence Rinder, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, 

Dieter Buchhart, KJ Abudu

Karma, New York, 2024

572 pages, hardcover

11 × 10 1⁄4 inches

PUBLICATION: To coincide with ’90s Paintings, Karma has published Ouattara Watts, the first comprehensive monograph on the artist. Edited by curator and scholar Dieter Buchhart, this 572-page volume features essays by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie and Lawrence Rinder and a conversation between the artist and Swiss Institute curator KJ Abudu. The monograph reproduces 277 paintings by Watts from 1986 to the present.

KARMA GALLERY

22 East 2nd Street, New York, NY 10003

karmakarma.org

Will Boone @ Karma Gallery, NYC - No Man’s Land

Will Boone: No Man’s Land

Karma, New York

January 7– February 25, 2023

Karma presents No Man’s Land, a solo exhibition of new sculpture by WILL BOONE.

No Man’s Land is a scenic exhibition that began for Will Boone with an encounter at a swap meet in 2017. Among a menagerie of figurines, toys, horror movie monsters, and busts of United States presidents and music legends, Boone found resonance with sculptures of antiquity. Medusa and Julius Caesar were swapped for Frankenstein and John F. Kennedy; dinged-up plastic and flaking enamel paint took the place of chipped marble and weathered bronze. 

In more than forty works, Will Boone transforms relics of Americana into bronze statues. Like a model toy, Boone hand-paints each with enamel paint, producing a brushy and vibrant surface. Amidst cacti and aloes, a tiger and a barking dog have a standoff at the gallery’s center. A rabbit leaps across a skull and an eagle hangs from the ceiling. A vulture perches on a rock, surveying bones. Several works are deliberately paired together, forming tableaus: a rat and a ribcage, a dinosaur and a tree stump, a spider’s web amidst barren branches, a cactus and a foot. A sculpture hall sourced from the desert of American culture, the exhibition marks the first time this body of work will be shown in its entirety. 

To Donald Judd, Texas famously offered a “featureless landscape,” an empty space that harmonized with his sculptural practice. For Will Boone, Texas is “featured”—defined by cultural artifacts, by its specificities, by a chorus of oddities, exemplified in the roadside attractions and strange monuments through which small towns assert themselves against the monotony Judd embraced. Boone’s bronze sculptures are made in Bastrop, a small town, home to a gas station barbecue joint featured in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a foundry that produces statues and roadside attractions. 

Bronze ensures that Will Boone’s figures will last far into the future, where they will become relics in their own right. This vastness of time attains a symmetrical spatiality with the vastness of the desert. In doing so, Boone reminds us that his sculptures’ bright exteriors will eventually fade, rusting into the inexorable unknown, into No Man’s Land. 

KARMA

22 East 2nd Street, New York, NY, 10003

karmakarma.org

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Robert Grosvenor @ Karma, Los Angeles

Robert Grosvenor

Karma, Los Angeles

November 12 – December 23, 2022

Karma presents a solo exhibition of work by Robert Grosvenor.

A painted steel exterior exposes patches of movement, signs perhaps of a human hand. The color, a greenish yellow, coats a form which is at once recognizable and enigmatic. Placed  atop rubber tires, a form of a classic American car is evoked, yet further modified by Grosvenor to become a sculpture which resists representation.

In another work, a curving form in blue is made of fiberglass, wood cardboard. The structure also features curving edges, but in place of a sanded, smooth surface, its swoops are studded with rows of soft semi-spheres. Reminiscent of modern furniture, the work radiates  from Robert Grosvenor’s practice which finds in mid-century technologies and cultural lores the means to expand the definitions of sculpture.

Owing to a wide-ranging body of work which includes drawing, photography and monumental sculpture, and coupled with an aversion to rationalizations of his work through language, Robert Grosvenor’s output is elusive. And while his work has been included in seminal exhibitions of Minimalism, Robert Grosvenor has always maintained his own program, in which playfulness, nostalgia, and retrofuturism takes the place of the cool austerity emblematic of the genre. The result is an expansiveness, sourced from Robert Grosvenor’s ability to find in the bevy of collective culture and technological innovation surprising constructions which rewires expectations and demands close inspection.

KARMA

7351 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90046

karmakarma.org

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Peter Bradley @ Karma, Los Angeles - Ruling Light: Paintings from the 1970s - Organized by Dieter Buchhart - Inaugural Exhibition of Karma Gallery, LA

Peter Bradley

Ruling Light: Paintings from the 1970s

Organized by Dieter Buchhart

Karma, Los Angeles

September 29 – November 5, 2022

Karma presenst a major exhibition of work by Peter Bradley, Ruling Light: Paintings from the 1970s, organized by Dieter Buchhart. This show brings together works from a critical decade of Peter Bradley’s career and is the inaugural exhibition for Karma’s Los Angeles gallery.

In the early 1970s, the young painter Peter Bradley expanded the formal and material constraints of abstract painting. Bradley was an early adopter of gel-acrylics, which he valued because they allowed him to paint with immediacy and gave him a nearly infinite range of chromatic possibilities. Instead of traditional brushes, Bradley favored the speed of commercial grade equipment. In 1965, Bradley had started to use a spray gun, which made him among one of the first artists to use the technology. [1] The effect was potent, swift and open. A leader in the development of the Color Field movement, Bradley’s central concern was to release color from its pictorial bounds; he remains unconcerned with labels. 

In the early 1970s, Peter Bradley favored the empty warehouses that proliferated across Downtown Manhattan, where he worked in the same buildings with artists William T. Williams, Kenneth Noland, Joel Shapiro and Mark Rothko. Bradley lay his canvases on his studio floors, applying color from above. During this period, Bradley was friends with musicians including Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Art Blakely. He continues to listen to jazz while he works, applying the same spirit of spontaneity and improvisation to his artistic practice. 

Peter Bradley’s explorations with abstract painting were featured in significant exhibitions including the 1973 Whitney Biennial. The young painter’s robust practice fostered a friendship between essayist Clement Greenberg and painter Kenneth Noland. In 1971 they would join him in Houston where, with the backing of philanthropist and collector John de Menil, Bradley would curate one of the nation’s first racially integrated exhibitions of abstract art, the De Luxe Show. In later interviews, Bradley puzzled over why the show had been deemed so radical; what mattered to him was a belief in abstraction, and the dedication of an artist, regardless of race. During the show’s run, he marveled at the way school children interacted with the works on display. “This is all airy and light and free,” he said of their openness, untouched by critical debates which swirled around his pathbreaking curation. [2]

Bradley selects the titles of his paintings from his expansive interests which include astronomy, jazz, luxury sports cars, and cultural icons. Nix Olympia (1973) takes its name from the highest peak in the solar system, a mountain on Mars, and is likewise atmospheric and otherworldly. Starmaker (1972) looks to the cosmos in a sublime gradient of primary color. Supersqualo No. 1 (1972) sports a monumental swell of peach and hot orange, named in reference to a model of Ferrari.

PETER BRADLEY was born in 1940 in Pennsylvania. After attending the Society for Arts and Crafts in Detroit he would make his way to New York City in the 1960s, working in the installation department at the Guggenheim and later as the associate director at Perls Gallery. In the 1980s, Bradley would spend time making sculptures in South Africa, as part of the Thupelo Workshop. Bradley continues to work from his studio in upstate New York, laying canvases on the ground and applying color, freed from formal constraints.  

A solo exhibition of recent paintings by Peter Bradley was exhibited at Karma in 2021 in New York. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Dallas Art Museum, Dallas, Texas; The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; African American Museum, Dallas, Texas; African American Museum, Los Angeles, California; and Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina, among others. Ruling Light: Paintings from the 1970s is accompanied by a  fully-illustrated monograph, including new texts by Hilton Als, Dieter Buchhart, Mia Matthias, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Nancy Princenthal. Karma LA will host a conversation between Dieter Buchhart, Jessica Bell Brown, Adger Cowans, Mia Matthias and Joel Shapiro on September 30th. 

Dieter Buchhart, born in 1971 in Vienna, is a curator and art theorist. Buchhart holds a PhD in art history and science (restoration), and has worked as a curator of many exhibitions in renowned international museums and art spaces. From 2007 to 2009, he was director of the Kunsthalle Krems near Vienna. Since 1999, Dieter Buchhart has written art criticism, monographs and interviews for Kunstforum International and other art magazines, and has contributed catalog essays, magazine articles, and lectures as an art theorist. His research foci range from art around 1900 and Expressionism, to art from the 1980s and contemporary art.

[1] Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), [2]

[ 2] Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), [204]

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