NEW YORK, NY.- Alison Bradey Projects is presenting 5 Years, a group exhibition commemorating the gallery’s fifth anniversary. Bringing together artists who have exhibited with the gallery since its founding, the exhibition includes works spanning more than six decades, gesturing to their individual practices as well as the gallery’s ethos as a whole.
Throughout the exhibition, abstraction and representation, permanence and impermanence, and intimacy and monumentality emerge as productive tensions. The works negotiate questions of heritage, transmission, objecthood, and relationality, all while remaining attentive to the beauty, complexity, and instability of everyday life. Across painting, photography, sculpture, ceramics, and installation, the artists assembled here approach observation not as passive looking but as an active process through which materials, images, and objects acquire meaning over time. Influence operates less as a linear narrative than as a form of proximity, revealing unexpected affinities between artists whose works are separated by decades yet united by a sustained attentiveness to the world around them.
This sensibility is evident in the work of Yuki Katsura, whose tableaux occupy a critical position within postwar Japanese art, and in that of Tadaaki Kuwayama, whose investigations of painting reduce the visual experience to subtle shifts in light, surface, and spatial perception. Their works appear alongside that of Mai Takeshita, whose practice draws upon the traditions of nihonga while extending them into a contemporary visual language. Separated by more than half a century, these works reveal distinct trajectories emerging from Japanese painting traditions. Analogously, the work of Rakuko Naito, Tetsuya Yamada, and Michi Itami offers generous explorations of repetition, structure, and the generative potential of restraint, while building on the histories of abstraction.
Questions of observation, memory, and manipulation likewise animate the photographic works in the exhibition. Kunié Sugiura’s hybrid approach to photography and painting, Tokuko Ushioda’s attentive depictions of everyday life, Tamiko Nishimura’s lyrical observations of urban space, Chuck Kelton’s otherworldly landscapes created without the camera, and Motoyuki Shitamichi’s investigations of landscapes marked by displacement each approach the potential of the photographic medium as a means of tracing relationships between personal experience and collective history. Their works reveal photography not as a medium of fixed documentation but as a site where time, memory, and place remain in continual negotiation.
Material transformation and potential emerge as other recurring concerns. The ceramic practices of Eiji Uematsu, Yuji Ueda, and Yoona Hur foreground processes of accumulation, erosion, and repair, while Tamiko Kawata’s rippling safety pin construction and Kaname Higa’s biomorphic sculpture transform ordinary and found materials into repositories of memory and exchange. In the works of Grace Sachi Troxell, Anna Gleeson, Miwa Neishi, Motohiro Takeda, and Francesco Simeti, material experimentation serves to explore the relationships among form, inheritance, and the mundane.
As both a celebration and a reflection, 5 YEARS offers an opportunity to consider the ideas that have animated Alison Bradley Projects since its inception. More than a retrospective of past exhibitions, it is a portrait of an evolving community of artists whose practices continue to challenge conventions, expand historical narratives, and deepen our understanding of contemporary experience.
