Anna Zorina Gallery is pleased to announce the John Bradford solo exhibition, If I Loved You. With these latest paintings, Bradford continues to depict vast space, air, light and lyricism: a balm for viewers to soothe the wild beasts inside and around. His work presents poignant reflections on the duality of our contemporary anxiety at odds with our inner yearning for completion, form, harmony, and beauty.
Bradford's layering technique is central to the mutability of his painterly surfaces. Beneath the generous sweeps of oil paint lies an independent foundation of modeled acrylic paste. This initial layer sometimes plays aggressively against the air and light of the surface paint, while at other times it enhances and enforces representational forms. This constant condition of taking in two concurrent yet distinct actions creates a constantly shifting experience for the viewer. One looks, ostensibly, at an image of a joyous wedding ceremony and yet, some subliminal chaotic feeling lingers in the vigorous brushwork underlying it all.
In the work throughout the exhibition, Bradford celebrates the transcendent beauty of culture by incorporating specific references that meditate on the complexities of love, change, and the possibility of redemption. With the titular painting, the artist pays tribute to the first act of Rogers and Hammerstein’s seminal musical, Carousel, while also acknowledging the political turmoil surrounding its original debut in 1945 by centering on a grand scene that poses the question, ‘What if?’ Despite the complex and conflicting emotions that they are designed to convey, the paintings ultimately resolve their tensions into a unitary completeness, a wholeness of conception tempered by distinctions, separations, and boundaries. The artist envisions a sensory experience that gives form to the internal anxieties at the heart of our triumphs.
JOHN BRADFORD (born 1949, Wilmington, Delaware) received his BFA from Cooper Union in 1971 and MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1978. He is the 2011 recipient of prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Painting. John Bradford’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, New York Magazine, New Criterion, ArtNews, Village Voice, the Jewish Press and Hudson Review. His work is held in numerous private collections around the world and is represented in the public collection of the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art in St. Louis, Missouri and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT.