Bradley Harms - Infinity's Slippers

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Bradley Harms, “Infinity's Slippers,” 2024

(courtesy of the Gallery)

Artist Statement 

The notion of (im)purity is a significant aspect of my work in that the paintings are rooted in the reductivist purity that modernists strove for (Both the Grid and the Monochrome were benchmarks of modernist tendencies). These paintings differ significantly in-that, because they are applied freehand, they acknowledge their/my imperfect nature. This imbues them with their sense of personality or humanity… almost defiant in their imperfection.

Many of the works gently jibe clichéd Modernist tropes in an ironic critical posture aimed at parsing painting’s language, its authority, history, and affiliations.

These paintings are also contemporary objects with seams and edges that are confident and exacted. The surfaces are painted with mechanical conviction. They are slick as well as sincere, diagrammatic as well as sensual. A contemplation of modernism is transferred into a more frighteningly contemporary construct.

Ultimately, these paintings are dichotomies: the idea of purity versus A very human notion of imperfection. They are both an acknowledgment, And a critique of the history of Abstract Painting… playful in a very serious way.

“To say that there is an attitude of confidence in Brad Harms’ paintings is on understatement. Certitude of form, color and finish verges on arrogance. Still his paintings compel the viewer, beckoning us into their dialectic tension, a volley between method and imagination, structure and illusion. Combining the look of digital image-making techniques with Constructivist, DeStijl and Op Art sensibilities, Harms’ paintings advance the language of abstraction to the far side of postmodernism. They are precise and clean. They are impeccably crafted. Their format and scale sets up juxtapositions between calculated design and pictorial composition. These paradoxical moves within Harms’ fixed vocabulary of color, form, figure and ground set the stage for the conceptual underpinnings of these seductive and intelligent paintings.” - Michelle Grabner, Co-curator of the 2014 Whitney Biennial