Lisa Bradley

Hollis Taggart Galleries is pleased to present a survey of profound and evocative paintings by abstract artist Lisa Bradley. Featuring over thirty paintings dating from 1978 to the present, the series of works illustrates the unique and personal style in which Bradley arrives at a mysteriously shifting balance between stillness and motion. Against a restrained tonal palette, swirling traceries in white, black, blue and grey inflect the painted surface, where Bradley’s seemingly tumultuous brushstrokes leave a final impression of antithetical forces being resolved in consistently commanding harmonies.

Drawing the viewer into a state where (as described by the critic Carter Ratcliff) “seeing merges with every other aspect of being,” the paintings’ “abstractness” (as described by critic April Kingsley) “is central to their abiding spirituality.” Growing out of an individual experience that Bradley describes as: “When I paint, everything be[comes] clear . . . at a certain point one goes beyond emotion – everything fits, each stroke is right, perfect with itself” - the exhibition makes clear how Bradley has pushed the abstract tradition forward throughout her developing career.

After initial shows in Boston, Bradley moved to New York in the late 1970’s where she has lived, worked and exhibited continuously since. Her early career was supported and mentored by the famous dealer Betty Parsons, and she later found crucial support and appreciation from the famously avid collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel. She has exhibited widely in galleries and museums around the world. Institutions holding her paintings include the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Frederick Weisman Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, among others, and her works have been reviewed by critics in art publications including Artforum, D’Art International, Arts Magazine, and the Helsingin Sanomat.

Lisa Bradley: The Fullness of Being is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by noted art critic Carter Ratcliff who has, since 1969, contributed to major art journals including Art in America, Artforum, ARTnews, and Modern Painter, among others, and is the author of John Singer Sargent (1982), Georgia O’Keefe (1983), Andy Warhol: Portraits (2006), and Conrad Marca-Relli: A Redemptive Order (2011).