Last summer I kept getting emails about a new venue called Galerie Sardine. Who, I wondered, would want to name a gallery after a very small fish that travels in schools and is packed tightly in flat tins? The artist Joe Bradley and his irrepressible wife, Valentina Akerman, that’s who. “You can take it with you,” Akerman says, when I visit them in Bradley’s vast Long Island City studio. “It’s also not a fancy fish, and we like that.” Neither of them had ever run an art gallery before, but they took over a 1701 farmhouse on Main Street in Amagansett, at the eastern end of Long Island, and put on several shows that attracted throngs of local and far-flung art lovers, including the biggest fish in the art world, Larry Gagosian, whose summer house is in Amagansett.
“Joe and I have been collaborating ever since we met,” Akerman tells me. Their backgrounds could hardly be more different. Akerman, dark-haired and vivacious, is from Colombia, born and brought up in Bogotá. Bradley, quieter but just as playful, grew up in a family of nine children (seven of them, not including Joe, were adopted) in the scenic little beach town of Kittery, Maine. His father was an emergency room doctor. Her now retired father was a professor of economics at the National University of Colombia and wrote a Sunday newspaper editorial on politics. “He is an incredibly luminous person who’s engaged with the world and loves art and music and everything else,” she tells me. “My decibel of life comes from my father, and I can talk with him about anything.” Her mother, now an author, was a Freudian therapist who worked with children and adolescents. “My schoolmates were scared of her.” They didn’t want to go to her house because they thought she was “like a witch,” Akerman says. “She’s mysterious and a bit cold and a bit alluring all at once.” (“She’s a very glamorous woman,” Joe adds.)
Akerman’s parents divorced when she was 16, and her mother began writing books about her childhood in El Chocó, an extremely remote jungle on the Pacific coast of Colombia. Akerman studied architecture, came to New York to get her master’s at Columbia University, then practiced for a few years at the high-powered Davis Brody Bond architectural firm in New York, but withdrew after she was diagnosed with metastatic thyroid cancer. She was working as a freelance art director when Bradley came into her life.
Bradley’s childhood love of drawing didn’t fade as he grew up. He devoured underground comic books—R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, “that sort of thing”—and pored over art books on Picasso, Matisse, Miró, Calder, Warhol, and Lichtenstein in Kittery’s public library, and also spent time at the Portland Museum. “But it wasn’t until I got to the Rhode Island School of Design that I was bitten by the painting bug, and started seeing. All of a sudden, I was exposed to all of art history.” A fixation on a small Cézanne landscape, “a ratty little painting” called On the Banks of a River (ca. 1904-1905) at the RISD Museum, struck him as “kind of abject and punk rock,” and gave him the feeling “not that I could understand it, but that I could read it.” (Bradley was once the lead singer of a punk band called Cheeseburger.) His career was just beginning when he and Akerman got together. His riotously colored paintings were already drawing attention—he had a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 in 2006, seven years after he graduated from RISD. Roberta Smith of The New York Times described his early work as “ironic, anti-painting paintings…post-conceptual and challenging.” He has had New York galleries ever since—first the Canada gallery, then Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Gagosian, Petzel, and, since 2023, David Zwirner gallery. The vibrant new paintings all around us in his Long Island City studio are on view this summer, at Zwirner’s London outpost.
Akerman and Bradley met in the early 2000s at a loft party in Williamsburg. She had to run to a dinner, but the few minutes they had together intrigued her. “It was a classic love-at-first-sight situation for me,” Bradley says. “Valentina had this aura, a real glow about her, and I was totally attracted immediately.” They met again three days later, by chance, at an opening in Chelsea, and that was it. “From that night on, we were never apart,” Akerman says. “We were just magnetically together.” They married in the early aughts and had Leif, the first of four children, shortly thereafter. Basil, Alma, and Nova came along at five-year intervals.
“Leif looked at me last summer,” Akerman tells me, “and said, ‘Oh, your biological clock was ticking, so you opened a gallery because you couldn’t have more children.’ ” (Akerman is 49, Bradley is 50.) Sardine, their “fifth child,” was born in the Amagansett farmhouse, which they rented last May. They have been coming to Amagansett for more than a decade, renting different places and eventually buying and renovating a 1972 house designed by the architect Frank Israel. During the pandemic, they sold that house “in a state of panic,” Akerman says, “because we just didn’t know what was ahead,” and eventually rented the farmhouse on Main Street. “For some bizarre reason, we’ve been moving every couple of years, even though we’re this giant family.” They kept the second floor for themselves and shared their ground floor with the galleries for Sardine. (It was a tight squeeze to fit four kids, but nobody complained.) The idea was to show work of artists in a domestic setting rather than a white cube—artists who were friends and artists they didn’t know, whose work they loved.
“It’s an old farmhouse, an intimate space,” Bradley says. “You’re walking into somebody’s living room, and there’s furniture and lamps. So the work coexists with stuff that you live with.” The first show was in July 2024, a couple months after they moved into the house. They didn’t meet Janice Nowinski, an artist in their second show, until she came to the opening—though they had greatly admired her dark, intense paintings. “She makes these really little but very tender oil paintings, very painterly, usually reclining female nudes,” Bradley says. Several shows followed, including a much larger one by their friend Sophie von Hellermann, who is based in the UK. She came to Amagansett with her partner, Jonathan Viner, and their two children, and stayed with the couple for six weeks, painting on large canvases, screens, and furniture. She worked outdoors in front of the house, where passersby would stop to watch. “There was lots of laughter, dancing in the kitchen, trips to the beach, good food, and hard work!” von Hellermann recalls when I reach her in Seoul, where she is installing a show. “Sophie has this really beautiful, fluid relationship with her work,” Bradley says. “She’s working all the time. If you sit down for dinner with her, she’ll be drawing or making a watercolor.” Larry Gagosian came and zeroed in on a painting—of Akerman in front of the Sardine house, her arms outstretched—and purchased it for his Amagansett home.
Bradley and Akerman invited all the artists they showed last summer—Hadi Falapishi, Steve DiBenedetto, Sam and Erin Falls, Isabel Rower, and several others—to stay with them. It was a time of rollicking outdoor dinner parties at long tables on the front lawn, with great food and high-spirited conversation. “They come to be with our crazy, big, loud family in this little house to show art and have a party together,” Akerman says.
Like Bradley and Akerman, whose idea of fun is to pack up the kids and travel somewhere, Sardine is nomadic, setting up shop last October, during Art Basel, in an elegant Belle Époque apartment in Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood. Akerman pulled together a group show, “Naturalisms,” which included quirky works) by Justin Bradshaw, a little-known British artist; the New York– and Providence-based Ken D. Resseger; and others. On the theory that if you serve good food, people will come, she inveigled Bangkok-born Rose Chalalai Singh, the chef and owner of Paris’s beloved but now closed Rose Kitchen, to create “the most beautiful feast” (luncheon, to stand out from the crowd of gallery dinners) for their opening. She also brought in Teresa Rotschopf, the Viennese composer and former lead singer for the electro-pop band Bunny Lake, to perform for them. “Are you seeing a theme emerge?” Bradley asks me, with a wink. “The seat of the pants.”
This year’s season started in mid-May in France, but Burgundy, not Paris. The exhibition, which is called “Ternura/Fuerza (Tenderness/Force),” presents four women artists—two painters, two object makers—in a 19th-century villa that is part of the legendary vineyard Romanée-Conti; it was at the invitation of Le Consortium Museum in Dijon. (How Akerman pulled this one off is too complex to go into.) Sardine’s second Amagansett season kicked off in late May with a show by Cleveland painter Julian Kent, followed by shows of paintings from Joline Kwakkenbos with work from ceramic sculptor Isabel Rower, and then Japanese painter Tenki Hiramatsu. Pay attention—any or all of these artists could become stars.
Recently I visited the couple in their Upper West Side apartment, one of those great old buildings that seems to exist in a world of their own. The family has been there for three years and can’t renew their lease; they’ll have to move again. (So what else is new.) Akerman’s mother, Amalia Lú Posso, lives on another floor in the same building and helps with the younger children.) Five-year-old Nova has turned one of the corridors into his own gallery, with their homemade Galerie Sardine logo and dozens of his drawings on the wall. I don’t see any of Bradley’s works here, but a big painting by Carroll Dunham, two smaller ones by Paul Thek, and an even smaller one by Lee Lozano hold court in the spacious, inviting sitting room.
Bradley’s new paintings, which I saw in his Long Island City studio, are strikingly different from anything I’ve seen him do before. For the first time, the hints of human figures that hovered over some of his work have come out in the open in full, primitive force. Sinuous lines hold everything together, a joyous stew of colors and floral patterns that sit inside and outside the blocky human and animal figures that could have dropped in from a comic book or a prehistoric cave painting. There had actually been a premonition of this in the Angel’s Trumpet painting in his show at Zwirner last spring. “Working on Angel’s Trumpet,” Bradley tells me, “a fleshy, pink female form emerged front and center in the painting—kind of a busty Venus with an odd potato-shaped head…. There’s usually one picture that feels like an outlier, and these typically end up pointing the way forward.”
As Gavin Brown tells me, “Joe has been through a number of bodies of work, each one defiantly and fearlessly different from the previous…. He has a willingness to not be defined…. There is something about Joe’s work that has a strange emulsion of sophistication, primitivism, knowingness, and the unconscious. His was about as pure an approach to painting as I had encountered in decades. It doesn’t surprise me that he has taken yet another very bold leap.”
I ask Bradley about this bold leap to figuration.
“It’s funny,” he says. “It can be a bit nerve-racking, sort of like you’re revealing more and more of yourself—and you’re hoping you’re not so bad in the end.”