Museum 52
4 East 2nd Street, at Bowery, 347-789-7072
East Village / Lower East Side
April 22 - May 22, 2009
Reception: Thursday, April 30, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site
Joe Bradley’s series of ‘Schmagoo’ paintings are the result of numerous sketches, which become the seemingly immediate result – effectively honing and contradicting the gesture. The scrawls and doodles, a mixture of familiar signs and symbols, appear to form an incomplete alphabet of hieroglyphs. Ekblad describes her works as a result of her relation with words and “their potency, smell, vibration and tonality”.
Her sculptures and painting in effect channel writings turning them not into abstractions but instead re-realizing them in her equally personalized vocabulary. Sandner’s painterly renditions of found notes and text juxtapose the autobiographical with the language of gestural painting. The unexpected result is that they cancel each other out; a subversion and transcendence of both the painted marks and the original marks they represent. Braman’s work possesses a personal, poetic sensibility that reminds us that individuality cannot be edited out, and that the work is richer and more present as a result. Her marks, which incorporate hand written text and abruptly combined materials, formulate an appreciation of the sculpture and what forms it rather than an attempt to further abstract its existence.