BRADLEY HARMS

BIO | CV | IMAGES

For decades, Bradley Harms stood at the forefront of Canadian abstraction, producing paintings defined by confined, exacted edges and surfaces borrowed from the tropes of digital art, the certainty of the machine given form in paint. His newest body of work builds instead from the processes of the home, cutting, dyeing, ironing, sewing, stuffing. Where the earlier paintings pursued precision, these trade it for the intelligence of the hand, occupying an uncertain space between serious abstraction and familiar domestic objects, a stuffed toy, a well used sleeping bag, behaving less like windows and more like things encountered in the world. Across both bodies of work, Harms sharpens the same tension, between control and spontaneity, the machine and the hand.

Born in 1970 in Winnipeg, Harms received his BFA from the University of Calgary and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Vancouver, Calgary, and Los Angeles, and has exhibited extensively throughout Canada and internationally, including Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Miami, Munich, Sydney, Singapore, and Tokyo. His work is held in public collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Nickle Arts Museum, the University of Western Sydney, Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, the Glenbow Museum, and Google Toronto.