9 Paintings with drapery and eggs

We are happy to present 9 paintings of drapery and eggs, Justin Bradshaw’s solo exhibition in Rome opening December 3, 2025. Join us from 6 - 8 pm at Via dei Banchi Vecchi 24.

Justin Bradshaw (b. 1971, London, U.K.)studied at the City and East London Art College and, after an initial period in London, moved to Rome in 1994. There, he began an independent path that gradually shifted his focus from plein air painting to a more introspective approach. Following his first exhibition at Sala Margana in 1999, he developed a pictorial language grounded in technical rigor, traditional materials, and a growing interest in domestic interiors as threshold spaces.
Since 2019, he has worked from his countryside studio near Corchiano, where he continues to explore natural pigments and historical techniques. His work has been shown in institutional and international venues, including the Chiostro del Bramante (Rome), Palazzo Doebbing (Sutri), Galerie Sardine (Paris), and Studio Dosa (Los Angeles). He also has an upcoming solo exhibition at Galerie Sardine (New York).
His recent body of work focuses on intimate interiors and unmade beds, seen as suspended spaces in which presence is evoked through absence. These paintings operate as visual reflections on memory, longing, and the fragility of human experience, turning everyday settings into elegies for the ephemeral.

The reasons why an artist decides to leave the city for the countryside are almost never romantic, but practical, if not entirely private. Life outside major centers may seem simple (more approximation, less plutocracy), but work is not made easier by solitude, and the idea that working in a beautiful place guarantees immediate inspiration is a lie that lives only in the mind of the spectator. So why pursue autarky?

The group of paintings we are fortunate enough to encounter in this exhibition were produced in the most beautiful studio I have ever seen in my life, but that’s not the point, with pigments not only prepared but also extracted by the artist, and still, that is not the point, applied with brushes he made himself; but no that is still not the point. That is not the point.

The tendency to reduce the formal aspects of painting to mere anecdotes is an increasingly widespread distortion. Artists, as their own first observers, are caught between the satisfaction of affirming themselves as painters—where their most refined technical achievements serve as proof of their skill—and the need to break free from technique in order to trust once again in their own capacity to synthesize.

It would be a mistake to believe that Justin Bradshaw’s extraordinary craftsmanship is a self-indulgent exercise in anachronism. As he told me one afternoon: “I make these colors because I can’t find them on the market.” In this perfectionism, the romantic myth of the artist evaporates; with a kind of punitive resolve, he forces himself to extract from the earth what to many would seem the least interesting lump of mud, and transform it into an exact color.

Colors are made to gain further control over the result, out of a need for total accord with the subject, out of philology. What better way to portray an object than by bending the elements of its context into pigment? Using materials drawn from the soil immediately surrounding the studio to paint eggs that come from those same surroundings. You will agree this is a generative operation, not a descriptive one. I am convinced that if a forensic investigation team examined one of Justin’s paintings alongside the scene he used as a model, they would find numerous correspondences.

The subject emerges through its affinity with the workspace, a kind of antithesis to plein air. Everything in his studio has the dignity to become a painting, not by chance: a delicate hand has darkened the walls, diverted the light, and allowed things to accumulate organically.

I like to imagine that even if Justin did not enter the studio for months, something would naturally produce itself, such is the attraction among the elements inhabiting it.

In this dynamic, I find the answer to the first question: why autarky, why the countryside? To escape the contingent, the confusion, and the inconsistency.

—Daniele Milvio