NEW YORK, NY.- Alison Bradley Projects presents Form of Content, a three-person exhibition featuring paintings by Tadaaki Kuwayama alongside ceramic works by Yuji Ueda, and Anna Gleeson. Together, the works explore how form, structure, and material embody meaning—whether through the rigor of Minimalist abstraction, the elemental force of clay, or the immediacy of touch.

A pioneering figure in Minimalism, Tadaaki Kuwayama (b. 1932, Nagoya, Japan; d. 2023, New York) moved to New York in 1958 and developed a practice that sought to strip painting of subjectivity, gesture, and illusion. His aluminum and canvas panels, articulated by precise divisions and fields of pure color, exemplify an uncompromising pursuit of clarity. Over six decades, Kuwayama’s insistence on objectivity expanded the possibilities of abstraction and secured his place as one of the movement’s most exacting voices.

Yuji Ueda (b. 1975, Shigaraki, Japan), working in the historic pottery region of Shigaraki, approaches clay as a force of nature. His vessels often bulge, rupture, or collapse in the kiln, embodying the tension between control and accident. Ueda’s work pushes the traditions of Japanese ceramics to the edge of destruction, producing objects that feel at once geological and alive. Where Kuwayama enacts absolute discipline, Ueda embraces volatility and uncommon material pairings — yet both reach toward a purity of form that transcends narrative and symbolism.

The intuitive, hand-formed ceramics of Anna Gleeson (b. 1978, Newcastle, Australia) extend the conversation into a more intimate register, balancing Kuwayama’s stringency and Ueda’s raw intensity with immediacy and tactility. Her vessels resonate their haptic qualities: surfaces made of the exploration of terrain and contrapuntal glazing.

Form of Content underscores the continued resonance of Minimalism’s radical propositions while opening space for materiality, imperfection, and intuition. Kuwayama’s disciplined monochromes, Ueda’s volatile earthworks, and Gleeson’s intuitive vessels reveal a shared pursuit: to uncover meaning not beyond the work, but within the very forms themselves.

Tadaaki Kuwayama graduated from the Japanese Painting course at the Tokyo University of the Arts where he found himself uninterested in both the rigid traditional nihonga apprentice system as well as the contemporary art scene in Japan at that time. He moved to New York in 1958, along with his young wife, the painter Rakuko Naito, where they have been living and working ever since. After his 1961 solo exhibition at Green Gallery, the prominent vanguard gallery run by eccentric art dealer Richard Bellamy, Kuwayama began making monochromatic acrylic paintings in geometric forms, becoming a pioneer of what became known as the American Minimalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The artist turned his back on the abstract, and gesture-based painting style of the era, beginning to pursue another style of “pure abstract” painting alongside other young artists of his generation. Donald Judd, then an art critic, was an early advocate of Kuwayama and followed his career, noting his contribution to the emerging form of what would later be termed Minimalism.

Kuwayama has been the subject of countless solo and group exhibitions around the world, and his work is included in the collections of acclaimed institutions including the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and the Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, CT.

Yuji Ueda is a ceramic artist based in Shigaraki, a town in western Japan known as one of the Six Ancient Kilns of Japan. Born to a family of tea farmers, Ueda grew up surrounded by ceramics. After studying under Yasuhisa Kohyama, a leading figure in the field of Shigaraki ware, Ueda built his own anagama kiln in his hometown and started his own practice.

Ueda’s practice is guided by his keen interest in the texture and materiality of the clay native to Shigaraki and Iga. While oftentimes retaining a vestige of functionality as vessels, Ueda’s works are marked by unusual and unexpected forms resulting from his constant experimentation. The cracked surfaces and peeled-off layers powerfully evoke the raw quality of the clay. He further explores the expressive potential of the clay by combining it with materials and tools found at the hardware store. The unique properties of the soil of Shigaraki, for example, generate the beauty in color present in Ueda’s works. Much like a sunset, through which light filters through particles of chemical compounds in the air, Ueda has achieved an alchemical process that fixes these interactions for the viewer to behold. Despite the seemingly spontaneous quality of his works, Ueda’s practice is not entirely reliant on elements of chance, but on a carefully orchestrated meeting of materials and heat. His experiments are equally guided by his effort to achieve what he envisions prior to production. Ueda’s works are thus the result of a practice that both embraces spontaneity with diverse materiality and intervenes with juxtapositions in the natural process.

Anna Gleeson studied at Sydney College of the Arts and has lived between Berlin, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and New York for the last two decades. She works across printmaking, painting, and sculpture and has exhibited widely in Asia.

Her interest in ceramics stems from her early experiences of drawing vessels she encountered in museums. In her words, “I like the way they communicate across culture and time. Looking at an ancient Mesopotamian pot in the Louvre, I think: ‘I know what you mean.’ I know how to handle it and what I might use it for; it has an obvious relationship to the body. The paintings and prints of vessels here are my reading of that language.” For Gleeson, the intrigue of vessels lies in their dual nature, with an inside and an outside, a hole, an edge, and a rim. She admires the way they can stand in for the figure, seeming to have ankles, hips, arms, lips, ears, and an attitude.

Craftsmanship, a skill she admires, is out of her reach: “Craftsmanship is about an intimacy with materials and staying just inside the limits of the materials.” She delights in pushing the materials beyond what they can bear, creating new methodologies that interrupt and complicate existing modes of making. Gleeson's practice is bound up in her curiosity to see how the clay and form will fail, and what that failure might look like. This process reconnects the artist to her memories of making in childhood: not being as “good” as she’d like to be, but being completely absorbed in the attempt anyway.