Portraits in Exile
ARDEL Gallery of Modern Art, Bangkok, July 16 – August 20, 2009
Bradbeer has remained as open and amenable to ideas as an artist as he does as a person. Throughout his career he has chosen to remain open to dialectics within contemporary art while negotiating a polemic of substance and specificity within his practice.
His drawings offer representations of the human figure as a type of generic but absolute form in much the same way as reduced forms within abstraction have been used to signify the essential and inarguable. Over years of practice Bradbeer has reflected upon, and considered, the divide between figuration and abstraction as a central problem in the representation of ‘being’. This poses a dialectic within Bradbeer’s work hinting at an essential anxiety – the figure in isolation or alienation within the ‘Field’, embodied in a form of schematic representation, centrally positioned, and almost as a diagrammatic plan for ‘being’, beyond a contextual association yet embodied within a sense of idealism.
Peter Westwood