Justin Bradshaw's Wuthering Beds

9 Paintings with Drapery and Eggs, a new exhibition Rome

In his show– 9 paintings with drapery and eggs – hosted at the newly opened AMANITA gallery in Rome, an offshoot of the prestigious NYC gallery founded by Caio Twombly, Jacob Hyman, Tommaso Rositani and Garrett Goldsmith, Justin Bradshaw returns to some of his signature themes: unmade beds, empty armchairs and close-up still lifes of food objects – eggs and bananas.

Black, gray, and somber earthen tones dominate, as is characteristic of his work. Bradshaw makes his own pigments from earths gathered near his studio. The mood of his drapery in this show– always symbolic of intense emotion – has darkened. The space surrounding the beds and chairs feels more constricted, almost claustrophobic.

The poignancy of absence in his earlier work ( see For Jeanette) has given way to a visceral turmoil and negation. Those tempestuous bedscapes with tangled sheets evoke insomnia, wild love-making, nightmares, fevers—or a final struggle with one’s own demons. Sometimes those very sheets seem to morph into a contorted human form. The forward-facing armchairs are confrontational: No one will ever replace the missing human presence once seated there. Don’t even try. Yet here and there a flash of wit intrudes – do those bananas look like they’re mating? Does that single egg perched on a scallop shell slyly allude to the Birth of Venus?

With the eggs, we glimpse something new in his technique. They spiral out from their center like mini galaxies, emitting a faint luminescence, earthy colors brightened with a hint of muddy pink and rusty red. We feel a tactile pleasure in contemplating them. With his usual consummate skill, Bradshaw invites us to pluck one from the painting and weigh it in our hand.

The last painting in the show is very small , just 4 ¾ x 7 1/8 inches, an unmade bed with gray covers, over which hangs an oppressive black sky, constrained within a space so cramped the head and foot of the bed almost touch the edges of the frame. There’s something uncanny about it. It feels as though we are looking at it from a distance, at the end of a long corridor, yet simultaneously also from up-close through a keyhole. It’s Bradshaw’s way of teasing his viewers “out of thought”.

Paradoxically distance is required to see this painting at all. Stand too close and the bed dismantles itself into abstract planes, the disheveled covers collapse into a melted mass. As the eye is drawn to a midpoint above the bed where the gray meets the black, the bed itself seems to warp, as if viewed through a fisheye lens. Solid objects dissolve, become their own absence. The unmade bed is now undone.

On view at AMANITA until February 6

Palazzo Crivelli

Via dei Banchi Vecchi, 24

Open Tuesday - Saturday, 11 - 6 PM

Also of interest:

The Artist in his studio: