Peter Bradley (b. 1940, Connellsville, PA) is a painter and sculptor whose work is associated with the Color Field movement. Across his abstract paintings, vivid hues splatter and stain the canvas, creating surface effects that celebrate encounters with color. Bradley uses acrylic gel paint, a medium that was newly developed at the start of his practice, to combine wide gestural passages and saturated layers of color with an expressivity that influenced abstract artists such as the New Painters in the 1970s, and expanded the possibilities of the medium. His work takes advantage of the intrinsically performative nature of color, reveling in its brilliance and splendor.
As an Associate Director at Perls Gallery in the 1970s, Bradley sold modern twentieth-century masterworks and became known as one of New York’s original African American art dealers. He is also recognized for curating the first racially integrated show in the United States, with the backing of collector and philanthropist John de Menil. The De Luxe Show became a landmark moment in civil rights history. Presented in 1971 in Houston, the exhibition featured both white and Black abstract modern artists of the time, including Darby Bannard, Peter Bradley, Anthony Caro, Ed Clark, Frank Davis, Sam Gilliam, Robert Gordon, Richard Hunt, Virginia Jaramillo, Daniel Johnson, Craig Kauffman, Alvin Loving, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, Michael Steiner, William T. Williams, and James Wolfe.
Bradley’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; African American Museum, Dallas; African American Museum, Los Angeles; Fogg Museum, Boston; Aldrich Museum, Ridgewood, Connecticut; Hayward Museum, Hayward, California; University of Sydney, Sydney; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton; University of California, Berkeley; Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio; Johannesburg Art Foundation, South Africa; Menil Collection, Houston; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina; and the Stamford Museum and Nature Center, Stamford, Connecticut, among others.
[excerpted from Karma gallery website: www.karmakarma.org]