Joe Bradley

Jonathan Viner Gallery, London

Almine Rech Gallery, Paris

Acquired from the above by the present owner

London, Jonathan Viner Gallery, Joe Bradley: New Work, October - November 2009

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Forming part of Joe Bradley’s revered Schmagoo Paintings, the present work innovatively occupies the intriguing space between painting and sculpture. In its assemblage of two stretched canvases, Busted alludes to both Modernist geometric constructions and abstracted body parts, a sculptural concept that is further reconciled on a painterly level by the two concentric circles pinpointed by dark black spots at its centres. At once playful and absurd, these anthropomorphic scrawls enter into a dialogue with the rectilinear composition of the work, which can here be understood as breasts confined by a canvas body or eyes contained by a face. Radiating serious complexity and conceptual rigour while simultaneously underlined by humour, Busted stands at the very heart of Bradley’s artistic practice, which is as much informed by the art historical debate between form and content as it is by the elements of chance and quotidian experience.

Explaining the origin for the name of this particular series, Bradley remarked: "I came across the word "Schmagoo" in a book about New York City drug culture in the 1960's, it was (is?) used as a slang for Heroin. This struck me as kind of funny, that a narcotic as deep and dark as Smack could end up with such a goofy nick name. Sounds like a Jewish super hero or something. The word stuck with me, and I began to think of "Schmagoo" as short hand for some sort of Cosmic Substance... Primordial Muck. The stuff that gave birth to everything. Base matter. The Bardo. In approaching this body of work, I have been thinking of Painting as a metaphor for the original creative act. The Word made Flesh. The transmutation of Schmagoo into Alchemical Gold" (Joe Bradley cited in: Press Release, New York, Canada Gallery, Joe Bradley: Schmagoo Paintings, 2008, online). The influences behind the present work are multifarious, ranging from the urban underground drug culture of the 1960s to the structured methodological arrangement of pared back minimalist canvases. Symptomatic of Bradley’s conceptual understanding of painting, the present work is at once abstract and figurative, geometric and loose, composite and formless.

Busted refers as much to the banality of quotidian doodles as it does to art historical discourse by masterfully quoting an eclectic range of artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Robert Crumbs. Similar to Dubuffet, Bradley takes the raw, primal art of children as a source for his drawings and scribbles, whilst his fascination with Primitive art has led him to obsessively delve into Picasso’s oeuvre and writings. On the occasion of the first exhibition of this series in New York in 2008, the press release for the exhibition observed that “the Schmagoo Paintings are a compression of Mr Bradley's endless and playful self-examination and a celebration of his immersion in popular culture. These works are full of playful tweaks to our collective art piety, iconoclastic and dark like the late figuration of Philip Guston. The image could be a light bulb or a stick man but the result is a strange psychological presence” (Ibid.). While the careful choreography of assemblage and reduced mark-making positions the present work aesthetically within an almost Minimalist field, its complex and variegated conceptual invocations are testament to Bradley’s long-standing investment in the history of painting.