Joe Bradley: Merging night and day

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / On a warm, sunny day that teased people outdoors, I stepped into Zwirner to catch Joe Bradley’s current exhibition, “Vom Abend.” Nine large paintings gleamed within the pristine gallery. I’d in fact been on my way to see another show, but at Zwirner I lingered and I looked, unexpectedly beguiled. Pretty soon I relaxed and accepted I’d be here a while.

Animating my visit were two men who clearly shared my intrigue with the paintings. One, a well-known artist I pretended not to recognize, momentarily lay on the floor before Kalparush, while his friend, laughing, snapped a photo. This jovial reverence echoed something I sensed coursing through Bradley’s work: pure enthusiasm for abstract painting, as when a young art student first becomes enraptured, before other thoughts and opinions crowd in. A rawness and youthful vigor belie the artist’s sophisticated approach, and the palette is borderline garish. A squiggly net of lines cast across the canvas compartmentalizes mostly flat patches of cobalt blue, AstroTurf green, or egg yolk yellow, with dabs of paint in polka dots that call to mind a crude but clear night sky.

Every square inch clamors for attention. The work is drawn as much as painted, recalling at once hieroglyphics and a kindergartener’s crayon drawings. At times, recognizable forms– an eyeball, a sailboat, a crescent moon – emerge, and these too are swept up in whirlwind compositions. Chunks of dried paint add texture to the stippled surfaces. Not to be overlooked, the underpainting sneaks through, revealing the layered history of decisions: songs played in a different key that now act as harmony. The paintings are fast-paced and read a little off-kilter. Indeed, the show is more honky-tonk than opera.

Occident presents a kaleidoscopic dance just beyond a wavy black sea, or perhaps a row of hills, bordering the bottom edge. The red, blue, black, and green patches pulsate, lashed together by white and flesh-colored lines looping about and crossing in an X nearly at the dead center of the painting. Circles pause patiently at the summit of these heaps, like children anticipating their turn on a roller coaster.

Angel’s Trumpet, the only vertical painting in the show, makes me think of the Venus of Willendorf. A black potato head balances atop a bubblegum pink, blobby body, freckled with orange, red, and blue dots. The looping white line tying these parts together suggests breasts in an awkward scrawl that mimics a child’s line drawing of a bird, upside-down. Nearby, flowers burst in reverie and an apple shape seems suspended in time, only partially colored in.

One surprising aspect of this work is the visual mileage Bradley gets out of a rather basic palette. I recall the childhood excitement of prying open a brand-new box of 24 Crayola crayons: the gorgeously perfect array of colors, the immediate smell of wax, the thin tinted paper labelled in clean font with each color’s name. These moments flood back to me à la Proust’s madeleines. “Vom Abend” translates from the German as “from the evening,” and in a way Bradley has managed to merge night and day, the way we carry our dreams and memories into our tomorrows.

“Joe Bradley: Vom Abend,” Zwirner, 533 West 19th Street, New York, NY. Through May 18, 2024.

About the author: Natasha Sweeten is an artist living and working in Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley. Her paintings will be featured in a two-person show with LA sculptor David McDonald at Satchel Projects in New York City, opening May 16.