My Pet Ram is pleased to present A Piano Up My Nose, a solo exhibition of paintings and woodblock prints from Brooklyn-based artist Bradley Biancardi.

The world is an absurd place bound up in manmade structures and systems to which we hang for some semblance of order. Technology pervades every waking moment of our lives as we gradually forget learned skills, birthdays, and how to talk to one another in person. Bradley Biancardi’s practice embraces the inherent awkwardness of life and human relationships by focusing on surreal instants that grow tangential to actual lived experience. Fixating upon maps, breakfast, chess, and baseball, the artist pulls himself and us out of the swirling maelstrom of 21st-century living to stop, reflect, and appreciate the inanity of it all.

Though he works across two-dimensional media including painting, drawing, and printmaking, the act of drawing remains essential to a continued investigation into diverse subjects colliding with a vigorous figurative practice. Surreal still lifes and disembodied feet mix with art historical allusions and heavily-worked surfaces of oil, acrylic, and spray paint. In The Bar Fight, Biancardi’s smaller tableaus coalesce into a raucous composition filled with grisly, violent details rendered in a robust but comic style. Utilizing semi-humorous renditions to show horrific events, he pulls the viewer in close and allows them to study the minutiae of the goings-on. A severed head with a cartoonish bone sticking out of the neck, a phone in need of a charge, a chair-wielding would-be heroine in a Misfits t-shirt, all of these elements combine into a befuddling stage worthy of Robert Colescott or a B-movie action horror. Anchored in the real world and the violence of everyday life, Biancardi nonetheless crafts a visual framework for his viewers that allows for a deeper investigation of what it means to be alive today.

Perhaps to survive in an increasingly overwhelming world we must stray from the organizational structures of political and cultural institutions as we allow the bizarre and uncommon to pierce through the veil of normalcy. Noticing the intricacies of woodgrain in the bartop, the thick blades of grass growing between our toes, and our own inabilities to keep devices at full charge, we can take stock of the small things and detach from the prescribed urge to work and produce at every moment.

A Piano Up My Nose will be on view Friday, April 28 through Sunday, May 28, 2023. The gallery is located at 48 Hester Street in the Lower East Side. Gallery hours are Wednesday-Sunday from 12-6pm. For more information about this exhibition, please email info@mypetram.com.

Bradley Biancardi (b.1977, Chicago) has exhibited his work at My Pet Ram in Santa Barbara, CA; eyes never sleep, Freight+Volume, Arts+Leisure, Thierry Goldberg, Fresh Window, and BravinLee Programs in NY; Johalla Projects, Devening Projects+Editions, Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center, and the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago; and Steven Zevitas Gallery in Boston, among others. He has participated in artist residencies at Yaddo, The Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency by Collar Works, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Religare Arts Initiative in New Delhi. He has lectured as a Visiting Artist at the College of St. Rose, Yale University, Columbia University, Indiana University, and the University of Chicago among others. His work has been noted in the publications ArtMaze Mag, New American Paintings, Bad At Sports, and Newcity, among others. Biancardi lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Text by Graham W. Bell