“CONDO New York” Exhibition

JTT

[Image: Katherine Bradford "Swimmer, Water Drop" (2019) acrylic on canvas 40 x 30 in.]

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Katherine Bradford, Vaginal Davis, Jeffry Mitchell
JTT hosts Adams and Ollman

Adams and Ollman presents its second year of participation in Condo New York with a group exhibition hosted by JTT and featuring works by Katherine Bradford, Vaginal Davis, and Jeffry Mitchell. Through passages of contradictory space, non-linear narratives, or riotous decoration that obscure a depth of meaning, each artist in the exhibition establishes a personal landscape that eludes clear boundaries.

In Katherine Bradford’s Swimmer, Water Drop, 2019 on view in the exhibition, a central figure merges with a field of color that signifies water and yet does not obey the logic or constraints of a defined space. From the figure’s fingers, delineated by a shadowy line, pours a band of cyan blue that snakes to the bottom of the picture plane and marks a transition between states of solid and liquid, dreaming and waking, foreground and background. This work exemplifies Bradford’s place at the forefront of a genre of painting in which representation meets abstraction to create a psychological state. Her formal concerns of line, color and composition clash or rival with potential narratives and meaning, without minding the disjuncture.

Vaginal Davis conjures her paintings with a concoction of “cosmetics, beauty products, domestic household goods, witchcraft potions, elixirs and compounds.” Layers of expressive marks cover various found substrates—magazine pages, exhibition invitations, hotel stationery—as Davis deploys a painterly language of turbulent strokes, gestural lines, and smudgy wisps to form complex portraits of underrepresented or neglected historic figures, always with an eye on feminist and queer traces. Highlighting essence over likeness, Davis embraces an abstract definition of portraiture that speaks to surface and public persona as it veils a hidden, interior self.

Similarly, Jeffry Mitchell’s ceramic works reflect upon tensions between surface and depth. His masterful and heavily ornamented stoneware sculptures, enveloped by milky or golden glazes, have an ecstatic personality and generous energy. A hedonistic, indulgent approach pervades the work. A pot, often referencing a traditional vessel form, bearing the figure of an elephant or bear, for example, is blanketed and concealed in part by flowers, other figures, and various flourishes that intricately overwhelm and overtake the structure. Familiar patterns and images camouflage and obscure codified details such as fingers, holes and bits of language. Decoration and gilded elements speak to class and excess while the works simultaneously struggle and celebrate issues of sex, death, and faith, building meanings that are personal, contradictory, and subversive to permeate each work.

Katherine Bradford lives and works in New York. Bradford’s works have been exhibited at MoMA PS1 and the Brooklyn Museum, both New York; the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Massachusetts; the Weatherspoon Gallery, North Carolina; and most recently at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas and Prospect 4, New Orleans, Louisiana. She has been honored with two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; Smith College Museum, Massachusetts; Dallas Art Museum and the Menil Collection, both Texas; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Pennsylvania; and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon.

Vaginal Davis was born in Los Angeles and currently lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the New Museum, 80WSE, Cooper Union, Participant Inc., all in New York; National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, Romania; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka, Croatia; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, among many others. Recently, she has performed at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; New Museum, New York; documenta 14, Kassel; Lafayette Anticipations, Archives nationales, Paris; Arsenal Institut für Film und Videokunst, Berlin; GenderFest Athens, Greece; Creative Time Summit, Washington, D.C.; Kunstverein Hannover, Germany; Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario; Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, Scotland, among others.

Jeffry Mitchell lives and works in Seattle, WA. His work has been exhibited at Jewish Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, and New Museum of Contemporary Art, all New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Michigan; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Washington State University, Washington; Henry Art Gallery, Frye Art Museum, and Seattle Art Museum, all Washington; and Portland Art Museum, Oregon, among other venues. His work is included in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, California; the Fogg Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, both Massachusetts; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.