Imago
Exhibitions various
While the drawing has no literal religious intent, the suggestion of restriction and surrender is immediately recognizable and powerfully felt.
In contrast to this charged pathos expressed outwardly through the body, Bradbeer’s Imago drawings contain a more internalised, meditative focus. All the works from this series feature a frontal view of a head suspended in an often black, vacuum-like space. Drawn on an impressively large scale, the epic planes, peaks and valleys that comprise the Imago faces allows for each part of the whole to be examined in isolation, where the abstracted nature of these figurative drawings can be fully comprehended. The unwavering gaze that looks through the viewer and serene facial features that characterise these works are evocative of Eastern deities in their sublime and idealised countenance. Yet Bradbeer avoids direct cultural reference and its subsequent symbolic implications, maintaining instead universality in form and metaphor.
Marguerite Brown