Joe Bradley (American, b. 1975) is a painter who cycles through recognizable modes of twentieth-century abstraction, from hard-edged Minimalism to gestural, Abstract Expressionist-inflected painting.,Based in New York City and Amagansett, he first gained recognition with his Schmagoo Paintings (2008), invented symbols and doodles drawn in grease pencil on raw, unprimed canvas.,
Bradley earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999 and had his first New York gallery show in 2003. In 2006 he had his first solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, showing boldly painted monochromatic canvases arranged in modular, geometric formations that evoke architectural structures and human or robotic figures.His inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, co-curated by Shamim Momin, helped launch his career.He later had a mid-career survey at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, on the occasion of which he spoke with the artist Carroll Dunham, and in 2018 showed new paintings and drawings, “Day World”, at Gagosian in London.,
A 2026 survey at Kunsthalle Krems in Austria, his first institutional exhibition there, traced two decades of this shifting practice, from an early 2006 monochrome through the floor-painted canvases of the mid-2010s, made by walking on and scraping unprimed canvas until footprints and stains became part of the composition.,The works on view from 2023 to 2025 reintroduce drawing into brightly coloured compositions where cartoonish, totemic figures such as Dum Dum hover at the edge of legibility.Bradley works on multiple canvases at once to keep the process open, saying he paints because he enjoys looking at paintings and that “the audience is a fantasy” he does not think about while working.
