The Ogunquit Museum of American Art will present a major exhibition of work by Maine-born artist Joe Bradley, bringing together large-scale paintings, drawings, and sculptures spanning the past 25 years of his career. The exhibition explores the pastoral as a defining current in Bradley’s continually evolving practice. Known for moving fluidly between abstraction, figuration, and conceptual experimentation, Bradley has consistently challenged expectations of contemporary painting. His recent works turn toward the natural world, introducing expansive fields of color, earthy palettes, and loosely articulated environments that evoke open skies, grazing creatures, standing figures, and rural terrain.
Rather than offering a nostalgic vision of nature, Bradley reimagines the subject matter through gestural mark-making, material immediacy, and the language of modern abstraction. For Bradley, the pastoral becomes less a place than a state of mind—a space where abstraction and lived experience, figure and landscape, history and renewal converge. Presented in his home state, the exhibition offers a new perspective on this significant dimension of Bradley’s practice while situating his work within the cultural and geographic context of Maine.
