Peter Bradtke

Peter Bradtke (1947, Berlin) developed a fascination with the visual arts at an early age, which eventually led him to the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg. There he studied under Professor Bazon Brock, an influential thinker and artist who encouraged Bradtke to work conceptually and explore the boundaries between media. Starting in 1970, Bradtke began exhibiting his work, quickly establishing himself within the German art world of the 1970s, a period characterized by experimentation and new forms of visual expression.

In 1974, Bradtke undertook a nine-week journey through the United States, an experience that would have a lasting influence on his work. He documented the journey in a four-hour Super 8 film, which later served as the basis for his first landscapes, cityscapes, and so-called “portrait landscapes.” In these works, cinematic time and painterly stillness merge: dynamism and tranquility coexist, as if the paintings were fragments of a moving image. Starting in the 1980s, Bradtke expanded his subject matter to include self-portraits and still lifes, often inspired by the atmosphere and lighting of 1940s and 1950s film noir.

In 1986, Bradtke moved to New York, where he worked from his loft in SoHo on exhibitions in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. The city became a new source of inspiration: starting in 1994, he created his first nocturnal cityscapes of New York, which were both realistic and expressive. In 1996, he returned to Berlin and opened “Studio Soho East,” from which he captured the energy of the German capital. In the years that followed, he worked on projects involving bar interiors in Manhattan and on a series of paintings inspired by the Expressionist film *The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari* (1919). Since 2009, Bradtke has been exploring the interplay between photography and painting in his work, continuing his ongoing quest for image, movement, and perception.