Joe Bradley’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Krems unfolds less as a retrospective than as an ongoing conversation. Writing for Elephant, Petra Loho traces how openness, surprise and accumulation have shaped two decades of work.
Walking into Joe Bradley at Kunsthalle Krems feels a little like stepping into an artist’s subconscious mid-conversation—one where the speaker keeps changing languages but never loses the thread. Spanning two decades but weighted toward the last ten years, the exhibition foregrounds Bradley’s enduring impulse to keep painting “flexible and open-ended,” letting each work “show me what it’ll look like” only as it reveals itself.
This drive is apparent in the earliest work on view, a pared-down 2006 monochrome made when 1975-born Bradley was drawn to the form’s “purity” and “clarity”, even its boredom. Speaking in a soft voice, he recalls how a monochrome asks for a “leap of faith,” establishing a contract between painter and viewer grounded as much in trust as in vision. “This is me as a young man just finding my footing and looking for a place to begin,” he says. Rooted in early landscape painting, these first experiments feel less like declarations than tentative steps toward entering painting’s long, echoing history.
But the exhibition doesn’t frame Bradley’s evolution as minimalism abandoned. Instead, it charts a process of accumulation. Geometry, figuration, abstraction, and later a renewed line-based approach slide across one another, each phase layering over the last without displacing it. Bradley resists art-historical binaries—figure versus abstraction, gesture versus structure—because he came of age when, as he puts it, “all of that narrative of 20th-century art had collapsed… impulses that once would have been at loggerheads could sit comfortably side by side.”
By the time the exhibition reaches the monumental floor-painted canvases of the mid-2010s, we are deep in the physical, improvisational side of his practice. Canvases are walked on and scraped; footprints, smudges, and stains become part of the vocabulary. Bradley describes these paintings arriving either “almost like magic” or, more often, like a car accumulating flat tires and “grind[ing] to a halt.” The honesty is telling: the exhaustion is part of the work. These paintings feel lived-with, dragged into being by persistence as much as intuition.
The most recent works, from 2023–25, feel newly charged. Here Bradley reintroduces drawing into the composition. Lines loop and carve through expanses of exuberant color; cartoonish silhouettes hover at the edge of recognition; forms flicker in and out of legibility. This ambiguity is part of the pleasure. Bradley enjoys when a shape “emerges… then dissolves and shifts into some other form,” inviting viewers to project—sometimes hilariously—onto the work. He recalls a woman who saw “a woman giving birth and a pigeon” in Clancy, a painting he considered simply “a cow-like form.” Such moments underscore, for him, the futility of prediction. “The audience is a fantasy in a way. I don’t think about the audience while I’m painting, because it’s totally unpredictable what someone will get from a painting.” Instead, he looks inward: “I’m the audience. I surprise and amuse myself, and then hopefully that transfers.”
A volatility—between intention and accident, confidence and uncertainty—animates the entire show. Bradley works on multiple canvases at once to “decentralize” the process, ensuring no single piece carries the full pressure of resolution. This may be why the newer paintings feel resistant to closure. Drawn forms clash playfully with painterly passages; hints of art history sit beside impressions of the immediate world; the ground seems to shift beneath the viewer’s feet.
A small but telling group of sculptures extends these questions into three dimensions. Assemblages of found, altered, and fabricated elements, they test how far Bradley can “remove [his] hand” while still producing something that “reads as my own.” If the paintings turn on improvisation and pressure, the sculptures explore distance, another way of probing how much of the self can be withheld before a work stops being yours.
A possible through-line—though the exhibition resists offering one—is Bradley’s insistence on surprise, even for himself. He often describes painting as a “conversation” across time, a place where different visual languages can sit side by side, whether drawn from art history, popular culture, or the graphic sensibilities of his youth. His paintings are not quotations but responses: quick, intuitive, sometimes irreverent, always alert.
Krems may seem an unexpected venue for Bradley’s first museum exhibition in Austria, but the location feels apt. The show is less a conventional retrospective than a long exhale: an opportunity to watch an artist circle his motivations, double back, and revisit earlier shapes in order to “confuse the notion of linear progress.” Bradley paints, he says simply, because he enjoys looking at paintings. This exhibition—elastic, contradictory, absorbing—invites viewers to enjoy looking alongside him.
