David Cohen reviews the exhibition Katherine Bradford: New Work at Edward Thorp Gallery, on view through June 9, 2012.

Cohen writes that in Bradford's work "there is the peculiar poetic charm of provisional painting – a sense of blah, of nonchalance, of not quite caring about the slapdash, scruffy, Brooklyn-esque 'work in progress' look. But, on the other hand, there is also the energy, seriousness, and resolve of classic abstract painting. The happy marriage of naïveté and abstraction can feel at times as if a Chagall, Janice Biala or Aristodimos Kaldis has been pressed through a de Kooning sieve. Actually, forget that messy analogy: just recall that Wassily Kandinsky made naïve woodcuts before he invented abstraction. Or else bring to mind the reverse, high-abstraction-to-low-realism trajectory of Philip Guston."