Bradford Graves
Selected Works
February 14 – June 14, 2009
Sara Bedrick Gallery
During his lifetime Kerhonkson, NY- and New York City-based artist Bradford Graves produced numerous works of sculpture—both outdoor and indoor—along with drawings, illustrations, prints, and photographs. Committed to a deep exploration of ancient cultures while expressing a powerful connection to nature and his immediate surroundings, Graves produced a body of work that combined modernist geometries, a sophisticated visual humor, and complex references to myth, the land, and the body.
This Mirror Can Crack a Stone, 1981.........................................................Loud in the Blood IV, 1984
.....With the generous cooperation of the artist’s widow, the museum has organized a selective exhibition of Graves’ large- and medium-scale sculptural works and several sets of his works on paper. Works from Graves’ This Mirror Can Crack Stone series meld resonant ancient awareness with acute psychological subtleties. The Loud in the Blood series, with its elliptically archaic and codedly scientific iconography, embodies Graves’ ability to portray deep contradictions in his work—these sculptures and drawings refer simultaneously to anthropomorphized beasts and to magnified views of the human circulatory system. Other sculptural works in the exhibition, which explore the properties of stone, metal, and other materials, are both coded self-portraits overlaid with sets of references of great importance to the artist as well as deft and thoughtful studies of movement and form.
Untitled, 1963..........................................Dolphy I, 1973..............................................
.....The drawings in the exhibition show the range of Graves’ interests and approaches. Drawings and sketches of birds from early in his career are variously cheery, ominous, geometric, cartoon-like, and out-and-out political. Mid-career works on paper are torn, burned, collaged, and glued, illustrating the connections Graves sought—and found—between the plane of a drawing and the physical space of a sculpture. In these drawings, elements of form, material, and line combine in a manner that is reminiscent of sculptures from the same period. All of these works—the works on paper and the sculptures in limestone, wood, metal, concrete, and other found and manufactured materials—show Graves’ fundamental interest in synthesizing opposing elements while taking great care to maintain the fine distinctions between them.
Ravages of Silent Agencies VI,1993..................Stuttering His Own Bent, 1995
.....Graves, who was awarded an NEA fellowship in 1980, exhibited his work in museums, galleries, and sculpture parks in Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Rutgers, Princeton, Woodstock, and New York City, as well as Scotland, Haiti, and Yugoslavia. The artist was well known in the region and beyond as an energetic collaborator with creative people active in the fields of ethnomusicology, archaeology, experimental jazz and sound art, and poetry and spoken-word performance.
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