BRUSSELS.- Xavier Hufkens announced the representation of American artist Joe Bradley. The artist will continue to be represented by Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich and is also newly represented by Petzel Gallery in New York. The three galleries look forward to this joint venture and to supporting Bradley in the next stages of his career.
Joe Bradley has developed a style of visual language that is fluid throughout both the art historical canon and the artist’s personal experiences. Bradley continually reinvents his work in his paintings, drawings, and sculptures, with a profound fluency in iconic modes of art-making that allows him to elegantly move throughout Abstraction, Minimalism, and the gestural mark-making of Abstract Expressionism. Yet it is his awareness of both internal and external influences that frees him to take such ideas and make them all his own, never rooting himself in certainty. To him, the act of painting requires one to travel amongst the infinite conversations of painters past and present, frequently referencing what he calls the “shared space” of painting, an embracing of the relative nature of all visual art.
“I have been a longtime admirer of Joe’s work,” says Xavier Hufkens. “His controlled wit challenges how we think about painting. It encourages a careful, attentive gaze, which today feels more relevant than ever. We are truly excited that Joe has joined the gallery.”
Unconcerned with forging any one signature style, Bradley has instead built an oeuvre founded in a defiance to straightforward conformation. He constructs a unique and yet purportedly nonsensical iconography in his bold, large-scale, and graphic works, with perhaps the single carrying characteristic being his commitment to unconventional materials and an insistence on embedding a sense of humour in his work.
“Xavier and I have maintained a fruitful dialogue over the years,” says Joe Bradley. “I am thrilled to join, what I consider to be, one of the most exciting and forward-thinking galleries today.”
Joe Bradley (b. 1975, Kittery, Maine, US) lives and works in Avignon, France. He trained at the Rhode Island School of Design and first exhibited in New York in 2003. The artist was given a solo show at MoMA PS1 three years later and was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Recent solo exhibitions include Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (2017); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2017) and Bozar / Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (2017). His work is held in the following collections, among others: Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Joe Bradley’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery will be in September 2022.
