Joe Bradley & Joe Zucker with Phong H. Bui: New Social Environment #130

A Joe double feature: Joe Bradley AND Joe Zucker (@joe_zucker_artist) join us in New Social Environment #129 from the Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton, with host, Rail captain, Phong H. Bui (@phong.h.bui). The two painters discuss each other's work, trade thoughts on the politics of paint, pedagogy, and much more. Poet Jeremy Hoevenaar closes the conversation with a reading.

Learn more about this event on our website: https://brooklynrail.org/events/2020/09/14/phong-h-bui-with-joe-zucker-and-joe-bradley/

Joe Zucker (b. 1941, Chicago, Illinois, based in East Hampton, New York) has consistently been one of America’s most innovative artists. From the Seventies, Zucker experimented with what has become his signature technique: gluing painted cotton balls to canvas in a gridded arrangement. Resulting in a highly textured surface reminiscent of mosaic, this technique radically transforms the surface of the canvas and challenges the “flatness.” His imagery most often relates in some way to the materials and processes, for example the series’ with cotton plantation imagery executed in cotton balls rolled in paint. Throughout his extensive career, Zucker has exhibited alongside artists such as Agnes Martin and Brice Marden at the pioneering Bykert Gallery in the 1960s, and later with dealer Holly Solomon, who was well known for her support of new and experimental mediums.

Zucker’s work is in extensive public collections including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Tel Aviv Museum, Israel, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and many others.

In his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and mixed-media works, Joe Bradley has produced a visual language that oscillates freely between personal and art historical references. Constantly reinventing himself, he cycles through some of the most iconic modes of abstraction, investigating Minimalist questions of color and form, tapping into the spontaneous gesture of Abstract Expressionism, and creating cryptic signs and symbols in ingenious, lively drawings.

Bradley earned his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999 and had his first gallery show in New York in 2003. Just three years later he had his first solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, which included boldly painted monochromatic canvases arranged in geometric formations. These modular paintings investigate the ways that colors exist in relation to each other and to negative space, while subtly evoking architectural structures and human or robotic figures. In recent works Bradley paints fragments of unprimed canvas on the floor, collecting studio debris in swaths of color. Imbuing abstraction with a tactile immediacy, he applies the oil paint in thick layers to create captivating, tessellated compositions.

Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, Publisher and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, the River Rail, Rail Editions, and Rail Curatorial Projects. From 2007 to 2010 he served as Curatorial Advisor at MoMA PS1. His recent projects include Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, an ongoing curatorial project that was exhibited in 2019 as an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale and at Colby Museum in Waterville, Maine. He is a trustee of Studio in a School, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Anthology Film Archives, the Third Rail, the Miami Rail, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Second Shift Studio Space of Saint Paul, AICA (2007-2020), and is co-founder of the Monira Foundation, a non-profit which aims to curate ongoing exhibitions and public programming at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City and beyond. Forthcoming projects include the Detroit Rail, the first U.S. retrospective of Jonas Mekas, and Occupy Industry City: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, Year 3.

Jeremy Hoevenaar is the author of Cold Mountain Mirror Displacement (American Books), Our Insolvency (Resolving Host), and Insolvency, Insolvency! (Ugly Duckling Presse) and his writing has appeared in 6x6, The Recluse, The Believer, Vestiges, the Brooklyn Rail, and others.