2024

2023 

2021

Dove Bradshaw: Chance & Randomness 1969-2023

Elements, Spent Bullets, Guilty Marks, Thomas Rehbein Gallery, Cologne 

HERS: Spent Bullets & Contingency Paintings, Mascota Gallery, New York checklist

Six Continents, Contingengy and Body Works, SolwayJones Gallery, Los Angeles (Six Continents - salt from Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Eurasia, North and South America, separatory funnels, water, new Contingency Paintings and Works on paper, new Crack In The Air [thorn], photographs) checklist

Dove Bradshaw: Formformlessness, 1969-2003, with book and Limited Box Edition; curator: Sandra Kraskin, The Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, City University of New York, New York (Mid-career Exhibition, première Breath video, American version of Self Interest) checklist review

Contingency, book; Sandra Gering Gallery, New York (première Contingency Paintings and Works on paper, 2/0, arrhe) checklist

ONE More Cologne: Dedicated to Sol LeWitt, artists: Lawrence Anastasi, William Anastasi, Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Dove Bradshaw, Marcia Hafif, Jene Highstein, Melissa Kretschmer, Sol LeWitt, Richard Nonas, Janet Passehl, Cordy Ryman, Robert Ryman, Merrill Wagner; Thomas Rehbein Gallery, Cologne Checklist

Begin Again, A Biography of John Cage, Kenneth Silverman, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2010, pp. 276-7, 308, 348, 394, 397, 404

For The Birds, Sixth Interview, “I feel very close to conceptual art...” John Cage in conversation with Daniel Charles, Marion Boyars Boston: London, 1982, p. 157 (text)

Duray, Dan, The New York Observer, The Transom, 7/05, 2011, 8:39 PM, How the Met Got (Fire) Hosed.

Azziz, Ali Rahm, The Daily Pennsylvania, Oct. 27, 2011, 10:46 pm, Guest Column, The Chemical Heritage Foundation is a Museum that Makes Science Thoughtful, Provocative and Fun, permanent link: Guest Columns, Opinion: http://thedp.com/r/ead3a986.

Yazdani, Mehrdad, The Guardian, University of California at San Diego, 2005, Art Inspired by Accident. (Anastasi Bradshaw Cage Cunningham, photograph and review)

Morgan, Anne Barclay, Sculpture Magazine, September 2004, p. 48, Buddhism and Contemporary Sculpture The Manifestation of Awareness. (Negative Ions II, review)

The work of Dove Bradshaw works with our changing conceptions of time and space which we have assumed for a long time are two different things. She’s involved, as we are in our lives, because of art, with an almost scientific procedure, so that she can experiment in such a way as to prove something. And she can subject us to the results of her experiments which can open us to the life we are living…

It’s quite amazing. The fact that [her work] changes requires a change for me; it requires a change of attitude. If I so to speak change with it, then I can change with the world that I’m living in, which is doing the same thing.

We’re confronting now it seems to me in the very full way that her work is itself working—the identity, not the separateness, but the identity of time and space.

…Dove has introduced time into space, and our living is in that confusion.

The things that happen in her work are, so to speak, full of not her determination but its determination, such as chemical change, or gravity. She used the word event: whereas she’s interested in an undefined freedom of action for the chemistry. Of not doing anything.

…what we find in Dove’s work is constant experimentation with things to see what happens when you do that.

…Marcel Duchamp said, speaking of Utopia, that we won’t be able to reach it till we give up the notion of possession. And this work of Dove’s confronts possession completely…I was impressed by the difference between Rauschenberg’s empty white canvases [The White Paintings]…and the monochromatic white works that Dove has recently made, which if you touch them…the pigment comes off. Not only is it nature in transition from within, but we can move it, remove it by contact. That’s not exactly the same as those years ago, also beautiful works of Rauschenberg.

And the difference is the difference between then and now. That then became beautiful for me by receiving dust. This now equally whiteness and emptiness is willing to give itself and to change itself, and without losing itself. So that then becomes a model for daily behavior because it is anti-possession.

* * *

Dove’s work is preparing us for a constant loss and a constant gain, and also of not knowing whether it’s good or bad.

John Cage
John Cage and Thomas McEvilley
In Conversation, 1992 from Dove Bradshaw: Works 1969-1993, Sandra Gering Gallery, New York, 1993

The mix of mind and matter in Dove Bradshaw’s work is constantly surprising and rewarding.

Edward Albee
Fulbright recommendation, 2001

Dove Bradshaw's work is always provocative in the sense that it accomplishes one of art's primary functions—making us reconsider the boundaries and definitions of art.

Edward Albee
Dove Bradshaw, Nature Change and Indeterminacy, Batty LLC, New York, NJ, 2003

[Bradshaw] has a special eye for exquisite accident, whether self-initiated or found at random, like the plastic exuberance of bullets shaped by chance on impact, each as like as unlike one another. Greatly enlarged and cast in resin these visually precious found objects become her festive Spent Bullet sculptures, coated with metallic automotive colors.... She make the case that chance-based art has an impact and truth that rivals the most profound works of the last half-century.

Charles Stuckey, summation for Galería Mascota, NYC, 2021

I enjoyed seeing your combined show across the two beautifully-installed galleries; it was a powerful duet.
Well written, sensitive piece by Charles too. Nice to know that the Galería Mascota decamped temporarily from Mexico City in honor of your work in New York.

Sheena Wagstaff, Leonard Lauder Chair of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, for Galería Mascota, NYC, 2021

The show looks at once austere and exuberant. Not an easy thing to do.

Raphael Rubenstein
Guilty Marks & Spent Bullets
Thomas Rehbein Gallery, Cologne, 2018

[Dove Bradshaw] transforms trivial things into fairytale, mythical props that tell quite elementary stories. About heaven, hell and the earth in between. Elements on the Periodic Table (gold, sulfur, lead, arsenic ...) are their sculptural material. A broken eggshell (from the fairy tale goose?), a leaden feather (that certainly has fear of flying), and the apple that is entirely evil (well the fruit that caused the fall), is made of appleseeds which are poisonous (sic. actually arsenic).

Claudia Aignerwell
Galerien Kunst, Vienna
Review of Elements: The Devil is On the Earth, Hubert Winter Gallery, Vienna, 2018

Spent Bullets is a series of 3D printed blow-up versions of the police bullets Bradshaw made in 1979. Referring to the violent nature of police bullets, Bradshaw made fired bullets or slugs into adornments, meant to be worn outside of the body, countering the initial destructive forces bullets have within the body and also prohibiting melting down and re-use. The bullets blown up to 30 times their size, as shown in Spent Bullet (2016), have been surfaced with different materials such as gold, car paint, bronze and rubber, the last similar to expanding bullets some current day American police forces use, increasing incapacitation and maximum harm to their intended targets.

Helen van Gorkum
Metropolis M
Review of the Glass House Exhibition, Amsterdam, 2016

Unintended Consequences: a presentation of eight abstract sculptures, all from 2015/16, and eleven linen canvases, all covered with silver and liver of sulfur and most from 2015. The works on view had an Abstract Expressionist look: they seemed intensely, even wildly, expressive, fraught with energy, beside themselves with excitement, dramatically restless. Yet this effect was deceptive–the sculptures are in fact assisted readymades. To create these works, Bradshaw first collected spent bullets, all warped and deformed from the force of impact, and made 3D scans of them. Then she "printed" the bullets out at roughly thirty times their original size and finally patinated the "blown-up" objects in rubber or in various metals. Placed on pedestals and glittering in the gallery lights, these found abstractions are the dazzling keepsakes of a fired gun: the aftermath of violence–of destruction–in seductive form.

The paintings, meanwhile, continue a mode of artmaking Bradshaw began in 1984, when she first applied liver of sulfur to silver. In these refulgent works, the sulfur (a chemical typically used in metalwork to form a patina) appears to have burned the silver leaf, leaving streaks of black--dark marks that emphasize the ever-present strain of destructiveness in her work, the death-inflected or even death-infected. Unlike the AbEx painter heroically revealing his or her inner self, Bradshaw is more like an alchemist. She sets in motion a transformation–a chain reaction–whose particular final shape she can't anticipate. The results are entropic, unpredictable, marked with chaos, at once geological and otherworldly, like the volcanic surface of a distant planet. Are Bradshaw's mind-teasing and eye provoking Dadaesque works "poems"? Her work is certainly tinged with a certain Romantic sensibility.

At Sandra Gering a simultaneous presentation of Bradshaw's work focused on her "Angles, a series she has been working on since 2000. Each of these works is created on a triangular ground, and features a painted triangle that is exactly one quarter of the size of the support. Within these basic parameters–Bradshaw finds significant room for variation. ... She also orients the works on the wall in different ways, and changes their position during a show's run. She plays God–even if God, unlike Bradshaw, left nothing to chance. Nature she seems to tell us, can and cannot be controlled: It follows a predictable if eccentric course.

Donald Kuspit
ARTForum May 2016
Danese Corey Gallery, New York
Sandra Gering Inc, New York, 2016

Meteorological Alchemist: Sticks covered with sulfur are thrown onto a silver leaf ground and at first transform themselves into a copper hue. Left outdoors, in rain, sun or wind [sic: snow], the silvered canvas slowly alters. The oxidizing copper [and limestone sculpture] takes on delicate tints of turquoise…. These chemical transformations are part of Dove Bradshaw’s laboratory (b. 1949, New York). The paintings and sculptures carry with them their own creative process. She selects the materials and her modus operandi. Then the process is carried on by the materials themselves in conjunction with ‘external contingencies,’ their chemical responses to weather. Wind, rain, and sun will mark the work. Ultimately, it is the mark of time, traces of day or night that create these sumptuous proposals. The textures and materials that unfold on the canvas retain their share of mystery. We see something that approaches abstraction. But nothing is painted, everything is induced by chemicals and by time.

Muriel de Crayoncour
Review of Thomas Rehbein Gallery, Brussels
Mu in the City
Visual Arts Magazine, 2016

In art, as in life, Bradshaw brings a minimalist's eye to the conceptual work she creates—without material or aesthetic sacrifice....Her score for “Angles” (a series in which the roll of a die specifies the horizon of a triangular painting each day of its exhibition) .... Bradshaw has a segment of oeuvre that casts decision and chance at the moment of impact. She "stops time” with a just-cracked eggshell, rendered in solid gold. Lead slugs collected from the NYPD are repurposed toward sculpture and objects of adornment.... It's fitting, then, that Bradshaw is among the first contemporary artists invited to exhibit her sculptures alongside Isamu Noguchi's installation at his namesake Queens museum and sculpture garden for the Museum of Stones” exhibition. In “Waterstone,” a funnel focuses and regulates a steady drop of water on porous limestone. The depth of localized erosion depends on how long a piece has been “active,” a testament to Bradshaw’s 19-year devotional. In another work contending with material change, white calcareous tufa stone, freshly quarried from Denmark specifically for the exhibition, bleeds traces of chalk in its "youth," but hardens and darkens with age.

Natasha Tauber
CoolHand Hunting
The Museum of Stones, 2015
The Noguchi Museum, Brooklyn, New York

“…[Bradshaw’s] work shows us that both art and life are inherently unstable, in thrall to time.

Lily Wei
Art In America, 2015

AWESOME!

Hard to think of anyone else’s works better suited to that context and relationship. [Noguchi Museum exhibition of Museum of Stones, five outdoor works placed in the garden along with Noguchi's sculptures]

Michael Straus
Collector and curator,
Whitney Museum Drawings Board,
Andy Warhol Museum Board, 2015

[Bradshaw’s] work can be seen as balanced at that line where you’re seeking for that other sense of intention which is in nature, without completely loosing your grip on culture, or that very circumscribed trap of limited intention which is history. So in terms of [John Cage’s] remark about getting out of whatever cage you are in, Dove’s work is about hovering at the door of that cage maybe you’re not sure which way to go?

  *   *   *

There’s that moment when it’s almost like there’s a choice between form and void, and yet we can’t make the choice; we have to somehow have both. And this is that kind of perilous tightrope edge that I see Dove’s work walking.

*  *  *

…In relation to the much earlier works, the eggshell works from 1969. First there was the broken eggshell in bronze, then later in silver, then in 1988, the ones in gold…It stands at the beginning, like a matrix out of which Dove’s oeuvre unfolds. So, like the changing paintings, it has to do with going through the veil between form and non-form. The broken eggshell is there like the record of a transit, a crossing of that border. It has also struck me that the distinction you’ve brought up is like the Buddhist ideas that form is emptiness and emptiness is form. It reminds me too of something that I’ve read where you talked about the possibility of there being nothing. And I took that phrase in two ways. And I took that phrase in two ways. First there’s the possibility of nothing, meaning it's possible that there would be nothing; then there's the possibility of nothing, meaning the world of potentiality comes out of nothing. And the egg piece to me seems to suggest all of that…

Thomas McEvilley
John Cage and Thomas McEvilley
In Conversation, 1992 from Dove Bradshaw: Works 1969-1993                                                                                                          

Bradshaw seems to have found an enduring mode of indeterminacy beyond Cage’s idea of the event that remains indeterminate until it happens. The flux produced by chemical ferment in a Contingency painting never ends unless the painting itself is destroyed…It will continue to document the process of change in the face of all certainties.

Thomas McEvilley
Dove Bradshaw, Nature Change and Indeterminacy, Batty LLC, New York, NJ, 2003

Dove Bradshaw’s work exists at the interstices of time, magic, alchemy, and natural materials...Three large paintings in the show revealed how dramatically this acid can create expressive landscapes. Contingency Pour takes Pollock’s drip painting technique to the next level; the liver of sulfur not only makes marks on the silver, it also continues to interact.  

Jan Garden Castro
Sculpture Magazine, 2008

Dove Bradshaw’s 2013 painting, Contingency (Snow Tracks), shows a really concrete, absolute way to think about color’s use in art. Bradshaw made the painting by applying liver of sulfur to a silver-coated canvas (the former substance reacts to patinate the latter). Her technique here and in other works uses chance-based methods — developed by Johns’s friends Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and John Cage — in order to create images rooted in the precise relationship of one chemical to another. There’s nothing more factual than that. It’s not morose or bright, just true.

Noah Dillon
Artcritical, 2015
http://www.artcritical.com/2015/08/10/noah-dillon-gray-marc-straus/#sthash.BbOcBkVh.dpuf

Referring to the clock and level: Though an instrument without a purpose, its shape, like an eight layed sideway, makes it a material infinity sign. As such, an instrument of measure that points to the immeasurable, it is emblematic of Bradshaw’s work.

David Frankel
IMAGES, Dove Bradshaw, New York, 2011

[Bradshaw’s] attraction to the truth of indeterminacy is equal to [her] suspicion of the absolute, of anything that attempts to fix meaning or to set a standard. She values the evolving dimension of each present moment and the stillness required to notice it.

Regina Coppola
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, 1999

Always get a serious vibe from your work–it has that earth magic virtually no one else has the way you do.

George Quasha
Artist

Bradshaw’s plane of tarnishing silver does turn out to be a kind of a mirror, despite its lack of polish, its refusal of clear and literal reflection. Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate…We see through a darkened mirror.

Barry Schwabsky
Pier Arts Center, Orkney, 1995

…A romantic Conceptualist who practices natural alchemy.

Ken Johnson
Negative Ions: New York Times, 1998

Attracted by her use of indeterminacy, the practice of using chance and natural forces to act upon her work, Cunningham invited Dove Bradshaw, along with William Anastasi, to become joint artistic advisors to his dance company in 1984. The resonances between Bradshaw’s work and that of Cunningham’s are clear; both made extensive use of chance procedures as part of their creation. Bradshaw’s Contingency Series abandons traditional artistic practices and uses materials that react differently depending on environmental conditions, just as Cunningham abandons not only musical forms, but narrative and other conventional elements of dance composition—such as cause and effect, and climax and anticlimax.

Stephen Jones
Christies Spring Catalogue, 2011

Some Conceptual art embraces depth and works on a number of levels—including the visual. Dove Bradshaw’s...Contingency Jets, made of silver, liver of sulfur, and beeswax applied to paper, are both compelling abstracts, rich in detail. But Bradshaw, a major innovator herself in artistic techniques for the past thirty-five years, is not content merely to present intriguing forms that repay even microscopic examination. No; we are also witnessing a chemical reaction in flagrante, a progressive devouring of the silver by the sulfur, leaving a residue of flakey white micro-crystals that form into tiny knobs. The artwork is changing, albeit very slowly, before our eyes, altering its shape, its composition, its texture (does it have an expiration date?) So Bradshaw has framed a slow dynamism, which for now looks like the silhouette of a water bear (tardigrade). It’s intriguing looking work, backed by an exciting concept.

Joel Simpson
M Magazine, 2009

Bradshaw pushes us, in a salutary fashion, beyond the conventional gallery experience.

Tom McDonough
Art in America, 1998

Since Bradshaw’s pieces are never final but will continue to change, how could a particular work be invalid? It can only be found more or less attractive at a particular moment. It’s a more Oriental esthetic philosophy than we are used to; risky, by Western standards, yet it produces beautiful results.

Reagan Upshaw
Art in America, 1993

Dove Bradshaw…has a distinct individual voice…most of the works here are unfinished, and never will be finished. She likes to set a work in motion, then put it out into the world to continue under its own steam. Contingency I-V for instance, consists of five silver panels, treated with liver of sulfur...As the various substances react with each other and with the air, with the water in the air, and with the moisture in the breath of the spectators-patches, blotches, lines and dots bloom and scab across the surface of the metal.

Duncan McLean
Scottish Press, 1995

The best of the serious art follows Buddhism's tenet of stripping away the extraneous...And refreshing the conceptualism of the ubiquitous debris pile, Dove Bradshaw...has hung a slowly dripping glass funnel filled with water over a cone of Himalayan salt. An elegant visual balance and a concise metaphor for time, death, man versus nature, or just about anything else, it works as a kind of universal mantra.

Robert Shuster
The Village Voice, 2007

I have often felt the whirling vortex of life/death, creation/destruction in [Dove Bradshaw's] work from the time of [her] early porcelain chair pieces through the salt [works].

Elizabeth Flower, 2008

The first artist to influence Bradshaw was Duchamp, whose Bicycle Wheel she first saw at the Museum of Modern Art when she was 14. In 1969 while a student a the Boston Museum School of Art, Bradshaw hung a bicycle wheel sideways from the ceiling of her studio as a perch for two live doves that a friend had given her; she then put a Zen archery target on the floor directly beneath the wheel, simultaneously referencing herself, Duchamp, and Johns

Composer Cage, whom Bradshaw met in 1977 through her longtime partner, the conceptual artist William Anastasi, helped her further refine the concept of indeterminacy that would shape all her future art. Bradshaw also collaborated with Cage on productions for Merce Cunningham Dance Company. And like Rauschenberg, she has tried her hand at a few white paintings. Like Johns and Rauschenberg she served as Artistic Adviser to Merce Cunningham Dance along with William Anastasi from 1984 to the company’s demise in 2011.

The most perfect expression of Bradshaw’s ability to conjure change and indeterminacy in this show (COPPER SILVER FOOL 'S GOLD), though, is its earliest work, Without Title (1969), which comprises two tarnished silver casts of the halves of a broken eggshell. It brings to mind Duchamp’s erotic bronze (originally plaster) cast Feuilles de vigne femelle (Female Fig Leaf), Johns’s painted cast bronze Ale Cans (a play on Duchamp’s ready-mades), and the new life of a dove.

Edith Newhall,
The Philadelphia Inquirer, 2012

Dove's work is beautiful and staggering. Many visitors loved her work and all were unaware of her renown. I'd love to show her work again. Some suggested to do a traveling exhibition on climate change.

Edith Newhall, Lisa Wu
Curator, Climate Stakeholders and Artists in Conversation
Live Worms Gallery, San Francisco

Furthermore Grant for Dove Bradshaw: Nature Change and Indeterminacy, text Thomas McEvilley, and republication of A Conversation between John Cage and Thomas McEvilley about the work, Mark Batty Publisher, LLP, West New York, New Jersey, 2003

Dove Bradshaw interviewed her one hundred and one year old mother, Kit Bradshaw at the 92nd Street Y, New York upon becoming chair-bound at the age of ninety-eight and a half never having made any visual art exploded like corked champagne into the production of various collages, none two alike. Her Nepalese rug and collages made in arrangements that Dove had made were on display.

2004

Anastasi Bradshaw Cage Cunningham; A Conversation, Opening of Anastasi Bradshaw Cage Cunningham, The Bayly Art Museum, The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, gallery talk

360° Interview With Dove Bradshaw, September 12th, by Christian Messham Muir, Studio Crasher, You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5tmUIiQ4xs

Dove Bradshaw, A Portrait by Robert Knafo, on You Tube

Anastasi Bradshaw Cage Cunningham Friendship and Collaboration, gallery talk and shot by the artist, William Anastasi: Sound Drawing, Evelina Domnitch and Dimitry Gelfand: musicians, sound and post production: CC Elian Studio, the University Art Gallery, University of Virginia at Charlottesville

2001

Elements, Stalke Gallery, Copenhagen, shot by the artist, DVD