NEW YORK, NY.- Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary art presents a curated exhibition of two major contemporary artists, Franz West and Joe Bradley. This inaugural contemporary art exhibition presents sculptures by Franz West and graphic works by Joe Bradley on loan from international private collections. Some works are available for sale. Taking place in the newly completed West galleries at Christie’s New York, the exhibition is open to the public from May 21th to June 30th.

Michael Gumener, specialist of Post-War & Contemporary Art and curator of the exhibition commented: “Franz West / Joe Bradley will be a visual essay created by the dialogue between the works of these two artists. Both Bradley and West explore notions of figuration and abstraction through a witty, process-oriented body of work that challenges the viewers’ interpretations and expectations. The vibrant color palette compounded with the biomorphic forms of Bradley and West's works are a pertinent testament to the current creative zeitgeist.”

Emerging a generation apart in two separate, but significant moments of distinctive pluralism and experimentation in the arts, the Viennese sculptor, Franz West, and New York based painter, Joe Bradley are widely regarded as two of the defining artists of the 1970s and early 2000s, respectively. Characterized by the immense diversity of their production, West and Bradley, though both deeply rooted in the history of art, have succeeded in maintaining their own sense of autonomy—avoiding alignment with any single style or movement. A pioneer of Relational Aesthetics, throughout his life the Viennese artist sought to link the performative and the participatory, ultimately driving a career that would blur the line between sculpture, design and installation. Developing his own decidedly individualized approach to art making, West broke through the traditional distinction between artwork, creator and viewer, dissolving the established idealization of high art and paving the way for artists such as Joe Bradley, who continue to shape our understanding and perception of art. Indeed, like his predecessor, Bradley, through a witty and staggering array of painterly styles and techniques, explores notions of figuration and abstraction that aims to challenge the viewers’ interpretations and expectations. Indeed, the mature works of Franz West, constructed after his most celebrated series of Paßstücks, and Joe Bradley’s seminal large-scale abstractions painted from 2008 onward, share additional commonalities in their raw material nature, as well as their desire to exist within both time and space, imbuing them with more than just striking visual similarities.

Joe Bradley (born in 1975)
Throughout his career, Joe Bradley has explored the potential of painting. His work poetically tell the story of their own making: frequently leaving his canvases on the studio floor to accrue paint and dirt, Bradley rejoices in the accidental marks that appear. Often painting on both sides of the canvas, Bradley allows color to seep through and intermingle, creating a unique chromatic dialogue that combines bold statement with an elusive sense of depth. His works bear witness to the legacy of Color Field painting and Abstract Expressionism, and his raw textural surfaces draw upon the influence of artists such as Jean Dubuffet and Cy Twombly. While people often read Bradley’s work as pure abstraction, he is in fact anchored in the figure, pushing towards one extreme only to suggest the other. In this way he is aligned with many significant art historical figures, from Franz Kline, whose energetic compositions began as projected abstractions of furniture in his house, to Willem de Kooning, who always pushed the limits of the line between abstraction and figuration, but who could not give up either the body or the landscape as his works’ ultimate referents.

Franz West (1947-2012)
“At first they were kind of an illusion, as though they were a joke on the collages. The collages are two-dimensional. They are out of life, in the dimension I inhabit, and I wanted objects in my life. My collages used color easily but my sculptures were white. Using color is like a musical composition, like songs, like a melody. I have been working in papier-mâché for many years. I came to this material because it’s cheap and easy to use. You can make it at home without too many complications. It doesn’t bleed. It doesn’t stink. And you can live with it without being afraid.” - Franz West

Born in 1947 in Vienna, Austria, Franz West is considered one of the most influential practitioners to have emerged from the 1960s generation of Viennese Actionists. His work comes out of his chaotic upbringing in post-World War II Vienna, growing up half-Jewish surrounded by former Nazis in a public housing project, and with the charged, visceral performances of the Viennese Actionists as the politicized backdrop of the post-1968 contemporary art scene. Some of West’s earliest works are drawings he made of the Actionists. It makes sense, then, that West’s entry into his sculptural practice would occur in a performative guise, through his Adaptives of the late 1970s, which West saw as creating environments because they could be handled and used, rather than simply looked at. This concern extended till the end of his life, with the performative being the launching pad for all of his work, and it was in this way that, by the 1980s, West could access exuberant marks of bright, gestural color. This parallels the performative paradigm governing Yves Klein’s work, where the event during which Klein orchestrated nude women as his paintbrushes to generate his Anthropometries was as important as the objects that were created during it. "I wanted to go beyond the purely optical and include tactile qualities as well. My works aren't things one just looks at, but things that the viewer is invited to handle." - Franz West