Billis Williams Gallery is pleased to present BRADLEY HANKEY: ALMOST A DREAM, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of the Los Angeles-based painter’s work. The exhibition features the newest body of large and medium scale urban landscape and skyscape paintings and opens with a reception on January 18th. The exhibition continues through February 15th.
Bradley Hankey’s paintings are an homage to the vistas of Los Angeles but also about the universality of the experience of a moment in time and the value of recognizing beauty. We have all encountered that pause at a sunset or angles of shadows or city lights at night – that breathing space when we stop everything and exist in a singular moment.
The paintings develop slowly over time, with each painting consisting of many layers. The base layers are made up of thick, opaque applications of paint while transparent glazes making up the final layers. Hankey is hyper focused on color and mixes his own paints to be able to achieve the intensely specific hues he uses. Hankey uses the emotional response elicited by color to shape how the viewer experiences these moments.
In reaction to the Photorealism of the 1960s and 1970s, a younger generation of painters including Hankey are looking not to replicate every detail but to capture the mood of the moment and place. While still using photography in their process, the intent of these painters weaves in the precepts of the Hudson River School and its idealized portrayal of nature but turns their lens from the natural world towards the urban landscape.
In this series, Hankey is exploring the tension between the specific and the universal. Using the power of the visual language of the Southern California landscape, Hankey’s use of recurring motifs and iconic forms create a sense of familiarity for some and aspiration for others. Hankey’s paintings, while based on photographs, are truly about color and brushwork and the exploration of form. While he is depicting actual places, he is also capturing the emotional resonance and sharing his experience of that moment with the viewer.
BRADLEY HANKEY received his BFA (Painting) in 2007 from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA, after studies in art and environmental issues at Lane Community College in Eugene, OR. His paintings are included in the collection of Hilbert Museum of California Art as well as numerous private collections and have been exhibited throughout the US and as well as in Costa Rica, Italy, and Tanzania. Hankey’s paintings have been featured in Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine, LA Weekly, Studio Visit Magazine, and catalogs from the Oceanside Museum and Art In Embassies Exhibitions. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
