Martin Bradley On Sale

Martin Bradley was born in 1931. The English painter is best known for abstract and symbolic artworks, influenced by the Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, as well as Buddhism, to which he converted. His name is always associated with travel; while he was traveling in Central and South America, he painted portraits of his shipmates. After his return to England, he studied Oriental languages, literature, and art history and developed a fascination with calligraphy art. During the 1950s, he moved to France, where he came in contact with Rudolphe Augustinci, who was the director of the famous art gallery. In 1978, Marcello Avenali, director of the Academy of Rome introduced him to Tatsuko. In 1979, entering in the ranks of the faithful of Nichiren Shōshū Buddhism, he lived in Mercatale in Val di Pesa, in the Chianti region (Tuscany, Italy) and signed a contract with Samy Kinge. Today, Bradley's artworks are held in the Tate Gallery collections in London, UK, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, USA. His artworks have been collected by Sir Barbara Hepworth, Sir Roland Penrose and Sir Herbert Read.

Beginning in the early 20th century, abstract art became a leading style of modernism. Rather than portray the world in a way that represented reality, as had been the dominating style of Western art in the previous centuries, abstract paintings, prints and sculptures are marked by a shift to geometric forms, gestural shapes and experimentation with color to express ideas, subject matter and scenes.

Although abstract art flourished in the early 1900s, propelled by movements like Fauvism and Cubism, it was rooted in the 19th century. In the 1840s, J.M.W. Turner emphasized light and motion for atmospheric paintings in which concrete details were blurred, and Paul Cézanne challenged traditional expectations of perspective in the 1890s.

Some of the earliest abstract artists — Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint — expanded on these breakthroughs while using vivid colors and forms to channel spiritual concepts. Painter Piet Mondrian, a Dutch pioneer of the art movement, explored geometric abstraction partly owing to his belief in Theosophy, which is grounded in a search for higher spiritual truths and embraces philosophers of the Renaissance period and medieval mystics. Black Square, a daringly simple 1913 work by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, was a watershed statement on creating art that was free “from the dead weight of the real world,” as he later wrote.

Surrealism in the 1920s, led by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Meret Oppenheim and others, saw painters creating abstract pieces in order to connect to the subconscious. When Abstract Expressionism emerged in New York during the mid-20th century, it similarly centered on the process of creation, in which Helen Frankenthaler’s expressive “soak-stain” technique, Jackson Pollock’s drips of paint, and Mark Rothko’s planes of color were a radical new type of abstraction.

Conceptual art, Pop art, Hard-Edge painting and many other movements offered fresh approaches to abstraction that continued into the 21st century, with major contemporary artists now exploring it, including Anish Kapoor, Mark Bradford, El Anatsui and Julie Mehretu.

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