Slater B. Bradley: The Secret Key

The Secret Key opening is a collaboration between the Berlin based American artist Slater B. Bradley and Zuecca Projects, Venice, Italy. Curated by Alessandro Possati, the exhibition will focus on Bradley’s current “Shield” series and host athree-day program of consciousness workshops, happenings and performances evolving around the notion of expansion of spirit and mind within the physical and material. Zuecca Projects aims to expand the scale of the exhibition during the 57th Venice Biennale in May 2017.
As departure point for The Secret Key – an experience based project – Bradley refers to the end of the Mayan Calendar on 21.12.12. The work makes an inquiry into the shift in the nature of human consciousness and spirituality within art in today´s transformative times of social uncertainty, artificial intelligence, lack of belief, and overabundance of images and information.
Bradley´s work came to international attention through such shows as his solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2005) or his participation in the Whitney Biennial, New York (2004). Since 2015, he has created a new series of abstract works oscillating between paintings and photographic images shot by the artist called “Shields”. Bradley incorporates the logic of picture making and photographic narratives as a conceptual backbone to impose an intuitive mark-making-technique across the picture plane field.

For The Secret Key, the artist has created a set of two “Shields” in gold and silver permanent marker. Hidden narratives incorporate the 12 stages of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, echoing themes Bradley explored earlier through his shadow work in the “Doppelganger” (1999-2012) series. The artist intention is to focus on the spiritual dimension of the work; including the realms of Shamanism, as for Bradley “The ‘Shields’ are sized in the Golden Ratio and playing with numerological codes and patterns. They are in harmony with the frequency of Natural Law and Source and ‘offer’ spiritual protection”.
In Bradley´s work the iconic and hero-figure in itself has evolved from tragic to epic, blending popular culture and the mass media with the realm of quantum-physics, spirituality and consciousness.

Slater B. Bradley, born in San Francisco, California in 1975, currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. His work has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2005), UC Berkeley Contemporary Art Museum and Pacifc Film Archive, California (2005), Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis, Missouri (2007), De Hallen Haarlem, Haarlem, The Netherlands (2009), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010), Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado (2011), and the Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, New York (2013). Recent group exhibitions include Dreaming Mirrors | Dreaming Screens, Sprüth Magers Berlin (2016), Like a Rolling Stone, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada (2016). Upcoming exhibitions include Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flanerie at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2017), and Michael Jackson: On The Wall, National Portrait Gallery, London, UK (2018). Moreover his film-based work of the early 2000′s will be presented within Cinema Dynamo at the Centre D’ Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (2017).

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