Bradley Hart's Injected Bubble Wrap at Cavalier

Bradley Hart’s medium is bubble wrap — each bubble individually injected with a syringe of acrylic paint. The result is large-scale, pixelated images that carry an unmistakably digital quality, as if a painting has been translated through a screen and then materialized in three dimensions.

His show at Cavalier Gallery, The Masters Interpreted: Injections and Impressions, pushed the process further. Hart created a second body of work — “impressions” — made from the excess paint that bleeds out of each bubble during injection. Two distinct series from a single obsessive act.

The Masters Interpreted: Injections and Impressions By Bradley Hart

May 7 – May 31st, 2014 Opening May 7th, 2014 from 6–8 PM

Project 3W57 Presented by Cavalier Gallery, LLC 3 W 57th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY Open Monday – Saturday 10am–5pm

The exhibition’s subject matter adds another layer: Hart turned the technique on canonical masterworks — da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring, Van Gogh’s Self Portrait with Gray Felt Hat. Images most people have encountered exclusively through screens and reproductions, now rebuilt bubble by bubble into something physical and new.

The concept has a pointed logic. In an era where images are shared as patterns of 1s and 0s, Hart treats each bubble as a unit of digital code. The paintings that get reproduced most are the ones most degraded by endless digital transmission — familiar to millions, experienced directly by almost none. Hart’s pixelated reconstructions acknowledge that mediated reality while insisting on a handmade, labor-intensive response to it.

Hart’s work has been exhibited at major art fairs in Miami, Los Angeles, New York, and Toronto, and has been featured by Reuters and Yahoo.