"Your Story"
RY DAVID BRADLEY
TRISTIAN KOENIG
19 GLASSHOUSE ROAD, COLLINGWOOD, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA 3066
Telephone : +61 498 694715 email
February 8th > March 3rd, 2018
Tristian Koenig is delighted to announce the opening of ‘Your Story’ - a solo exhibition of new work by Ry David Bradley, his fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and the first exhibition of our 2018 season.
In August 2016, Instagram launched Instagram ‘Stories’, a feature that allows users to take photos, add effects and layers, and add them to their Instagram account, which would then expire after 24 hours. Ry David Bradley’s ‘Your Story’ makes use of, and takes inspiration from this Instagram feature, with a suite of five new paintings all shot, edited and exported out of the Instagram App.
“Seeing how painting has colonized social media lately, it’s hard not to feel that there’s a sort of leaking away of the medium at the very moment it’s taking on a weird and happy new life. Cellularized, and abstracted as screen content via apps like Instagram, painting instantly sheds the material skeleton that has always given it body and scale while also escaping the social and institutional contexts that once positioned and grounded it in the world. Picking up speed within digital networks, it becomes virulently retinal again, shamelessly Op no matter what its genre or style. Often in circulation before it’s even finished, socialized, and speculated upon before it’s been physically transported or exhibited outside the studio, the work, once posted, is already ahead of itself and other than itself, which probably explains painting’s recent good mood: it travels much more lightly now as light”
John Kelsey, ‘The Sext Life of Painting’, Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age (Gesture and Spectacle, Eccentric Figuration, Social Networks), Museum Brandhorst, 2016
THE amalgamation, or lack thereof, of 21st century image culture and Painting is at the heart of Bradley’s practice. Image production, post-production, circulation and distribution - each with its own complex history, duration and discourse, might seem initially at odds with the somewhat anachronistic practice of Painting. However since the 19th century advent of photography, painting has had an intricate and elaborate dialectical relationship with ‘the image’. Bradley makes use of the fissures between image and painting to explore how the disposable, provisional and ubiquity of the contemporary image can be inverted, slowed down and re-quantified through embodiment as ‘painting’.
BRADLEY'S image-capture of the urban environment of Melbourne recalls the 19th century flâneur, the Surrealists beloved strolling and the Situationist dérive, which finds parallels in the ’stories’ functionality of Instagram, and to a lesser extent, Snapchat. The overlay of seemingly random gestural marking making has its basis in the formal language of Professional Editor's treatment of printed manuscripts, which today have been largely supplanted by on-screen digital processes. Bradley’s use of in-app marking also recalls the (im)permanence of shorthand construction code familiar to any urban setting.
YOUR STORY could be your story, though more likely its someone else’s; and its already been shared.
RY DAVID BRADLEY was born in Melbourne, and is based in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Realities, Neumeister Bar Am, Berlin, Germany; Room With A Views, The Hole, New York; Post Truth 2, Galerie Derouillon, Paris; 21th Century, PM/AM, London and Powershot, Bowerbank Ninow, Auckland. Bradley’s work resides in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Price Waterhouse Coopers, Sydney and the Aldala Collection, New York.
In August 2016, Instagram launched Instagram ‘Stories’, a feature that allows users to take photos, add effects and layers, and add them to their Instagram account, which would then expire after 24 hours. Ry David Bradley’s ‘Your Story’ makes use of, and takes inspiration from this Instagram feature, with a suite of five new paintings all shot, edited and exported out of the Instagram App.
“Seeing how painting has colonized social media lately, it’s hard not to feel that there’s a sort of leaking away of the medium at the very moment it’s taking on a weird and happy new life. Cellularized, and abstracted as screen content via apps like Instagram, painting instantly sheds the material skeleton that has always given it body and scale while also escaping the social and institutional contexts that once positioned and grounded it in the world. Picking up speed within digital networks, it becomes virulently retinal again, shamelessly Op no matter what its genre or style. Often in circulation before it’s even finished, socialized, and speculated upon before it’s been physically transported or exhibited outside the studio, the work, once posted, is already ahead of itself and other than itself, which probably explains painting’s recent good mood: it travels much more lightly now as light”
John Kelsey, ‘The Sext Life of Painting’, Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age (Gesture and Spectacle, Eccentric Figuration, Social Networks), Museum Brandhorst, 2016
THE amalgamation, or lack thereof, of 21st century image culture and Painting is at the heart of Bradley’s practice. Image production, post-production, circulation and distribution - each with its own complex history, duration and discourse, might seem initially at odds with the somewhat anachronistic practice of Painting. However since the 19th century advent of photography, painting has had an intricate and elaborate dialectical relationship with ‘the image’. Bradley makes use of the fissures between image and painting to explore how the disposable, provisional and ubiquity of the contemporary image can be inverted, slowed down and re-quantified through embodiment as ‘painting’.
BRADLEY'S image-capture of the urban environment of Melbourne recalls the 19th century flâneur, the Surrealists beloved strolling and the Situationist dérive, which finds parallels in the ’stories’ functionality of Instagram, and to a lesser extent, Snapchat. The overlay of seemingly random gestural marking making has its basis in the formal language of Professional Editor's treatment of printed manuscripts, which today have been largely supplanted by on-screen digital processes. Bradley’s use of in-app marking also recalls the (im)permanence of shorthand construction code familiar to any urban setting.
YOUR STORY could be your story, though more likely its someone else’s; and its already been shared.
RY DAVID BRADLEY was born in Melbourne, and is based in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Realities, Neumeister Bar Am, Berlin, Germany; Room With A Views, The Hole, New York; Post Truth 2, Galerie Derouillon, Paris; 21th Century, PM/AM, London and Powershot, Bowerbank Ninow, Auckland. Bradley’s work resides in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Price Waterhouse Coopers, Sydney and the Aldala Collection, New York.
OPENING RECEPTION:
there will be no opening reception for the exhibition
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AUSTRALIA art press release
Opening Times:
THURSDAY - SATURDAY 12-5PM VIA APPOINTMENT
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