CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/29/2017

We're loving Joe Bradley's 'large, scruffy-looking' paintings

“Veitch” (2015) is reproduced from Joe Bradley, published to accompany the artist’s first major American museum retrospective, now on view at the Albright-Knox. In the published interview, painter Carroll Dunham says, “Well, the paintings you’ve been working on in the most recent chapter, let’s say, have been… large, scruffy-looking oil paintings, big blocks of color. I know you’ve said to me before that you do see subjects in them, but it isn’t necessarily apparent what these subjects are. There seems to be this sort of physical search going on, like you’re digging around in the painting to find it.” Bradley responds, “The most successful paintings, to my mind, feel ‘found,’ as if someone else had painted them. To me, this signals that the painting has a life or personality of its own. It achieves a kind of independence; I don’t have to stand next to it. I don’t have to work on it anymore. It can go out into the world and speak for itself.”