Katherine Bradford “Shelf Paintings”
Arts + Leisure
This event has ended.
Katherine Bradford has been developing and enriching the art of hybrid painting/wall sculpture, which she calls Shelf Paintings, for her latest project now on view at Arts+Leisure in East Harlem. Her past exhibitions have included images of ocean liners, swimmers, divers, supermen, and assorted whimsical objects and figures; but as is always the case with her work, the real subject is invariably paint itself, in all its multi-hued, crusty, clunky, gooey, crumbly, smeared and expressed glory. Her shelf paintings reference the horizons and brute forms of Philip Guston as much as the armature and palette of Howard Hodgkin, and the distortion and nautical humor of Malcolm Morley; her palette blows hot and cool but her signature playful line and irreverent charm shine through consistently in every piece she makes.
But don’t let their simplicity and humble format mislead you – Bradford’s constructions are neither facile nor easily attained. They are a result of years of a dedicated, watchful, soul-searching studio practice, of years of steady addition and erasure, of multiple subtraction and accretion of paint and wood and clay and found material until the object becomes Something Else - undefined but clearly Bradford’s own. There is a kind of magic in these shelf works, a process of constant rebirth and seeing afresh so that every venture is made new and surprising. The titles – such as Liner Shelf, Phoenix, and White Preserver are testament to Bradford’s painterly themes – footnotes to her studio practice itself. She seems to say, why just store artwork on a shelf when you can show the whole shelf itself?
Media
Schedule
from November 15, 2014 to December 14, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-11-15 from 19:00 to 22:00