Two weeks before his first Gagosian show, the artist Joe Bradley is still in the thick of things. On the walls of his Brooklyn Navy Yard studio, wet canvases face off amid the organized chaos of paint buckets, unstretched linen and a lonesome espresso machine. “These ones are mostly finished,” Bradley says, motioning to a triptych of large abstract compositions. “Others need radical surgery.” The eight or so works in progress that ring the room represent six months of development — an ongoing self-editing process that won’t stop until the paintings are on their way to the gallery. “Just knowing the deadline is looming, some kind of performative thing kicks in,” Bradley explains. “Otherwise you could play with something indefinitely.”
The option is tempting. Bradley’s sun-soaked loft seems like an idyllic place to paint away the hours — an activity the artist prefers to do in private. With part-time assistants to take care of the more “blue-collar chores,” Bradley maximizes his time to indulge his medium. “Oil paint has so much life. It really behaves like it wants to behave,” the 40-year-old says. “You’ll go into a painting with an idea of what you want to do, and 40 seconds later your plan has been upended. You always have to deal with these little skirmishes on the canvases.”
Over the years, Bradley has repeatedly come out victorious — although it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why. Picked up by Canada gallery in the early 2000s, the soft-spoken artist found a loyal audience despite the aesthetic leaps he chose to make. His “Schmagoo Paintings,” slapdash grease-pencil drawings, followed his fleeting success as a minimalist (which found him stacking monochromatic canvases into the shape of rudimentary robots), and his prices jumped from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands. While Bradley’s critics suggest that his anti-style is more gimmick than substance, his fans laud him for his ability to continually find moments of sincerity and authenticity in art’s most painful clichés.