Guilty Marks

In the project room at Stalke Galleri, the American artist Dove Bradshaw presented the exhibition Guilty Marks. The first of these paintings was made in 1995, while the works shown in this exhibition were produced in 1998 and 1999.

Dove Bradshaw began working with indeterminate processes in 1969. Only in part did these paintings commit to this approach; to an equal degree, they were created with careful attention to formal concerns.

On a horizontal canvas, in a wet pool of varnish, a wide variety of materials and chemicals were dropped or poured. As the varnish set, the element of chance radically altered the composition.

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Views from Dove Bradshaw’s Guilty Marks series exhibited at Stalke Galleri.

In a review published in Politiken on June 18, 1999, Dove Bradshaw’s exhibition at Stalke Galleri was described as an exploration of transience and transformation, grounded in processes that deliberately exceed the artist’s control. The works were characterized as the result of ongoing chemical interactions poured and dripped onto canvas, where the final outcome remained unpredictable.

The reviewer emphasized that Bradshaw stages the encounter, but that “what emerges lies beyond her power”, allowing nature to take over the process. This approach was linked to a long-standing artistic interest in chance and indeterminacy, an orientation that has drawn attention from figures such as John Cage.

While the works recall aspects of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, the review stressed that Bradshaw’s practice is distinguished by its material grounding and temporal dimension. Most significantly, the exhibition was framed as a sustained investigation of impermanence and the time it takes for change to unfold.

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