Lisa Bradley: Beyond Luminosity

Encapsulating over five decades of Bradley’s spiritual renderings of gauzy traceries frozen in motionPublished with Delaware Art Museum.The abstract paintings of American artist Lisa Bradley (born 1951) are often touted as transcendent and meditative. Critic Carter Ratcliff has described her works as depicting “a pause between the pulses of some vast and luminous energy.” She is best known for her reductive vocabulary of forms—whirlpool and vortex-like trajectories positioned in the center of her canvases—overlain with translucent pigment in blues, grays and blacks. Rendering her traceries with gestural brushwork, Bradley lends them spatial depth and intensity. The resulting effect is truly that of suspended time—a freeze-frame of a sublime, spectral force in motion. Beyond Luminosity invites readers to journey through Bradley’s luminous creations, from paintings of infinitely deep darks to her light-filled canvases. The monograph features insights into the artist’s oeuvre from prominent curators, critics and art historians including Ronny Cohen, Eleanor Heartney, Townsend Ludington, Carter Ratcliff and John Yau.