Parenthood in Soft Focus: Ivan Bridges at Sade Los Angeles

Ivan Bridges, Night Sky, 2024 (Courtesy Sade Los Angeles)

By MIEKE MARPLE July 25, 2025

It takes a lot for a painting show to stir me. I’ve seen too many over the course of 20 years. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised when I walked into Ivan Bridges’s solo exhibition “FEEL/FELT” at Sade Los Angeles on a Sunday evening after my daughter had gone to sleep. Actually, that’s not correct. I was pleasantly surprised when I received the show’s invite and noticed the painting on the flyer, a portrait of a tender figure from an oddly low angle made from dark stains and a few wispy lines of pencil. The economy of marks was strikingly emotional. I remained pleasantly surprised when I arrived at the Bridges’s show and saw the other, equally emotional canvases and watercolors. A melancholy come over me, the kind I feel in the presence of a loved one who will inevitably grow up, grow old, or otherwise fade into memory. I was not shocked to learn that the paintings were of the artist's partner and two small children.

Bridges’s work conjures the spirit of Marlena Dumas. Art critic Adrian Searle said of Dumas's paintings: "I am often struck by how little there seems to be on the canvas. The images coalesce out of almost nothing.” The same could be said of Bridges’s quick and minimal brushwork. As with the work of Dumas (who occasionally painted her daughter), Bridges’s painted family snapshots are not overly sentimental. Instead, they are clownish, sexualized, estranged. The best ones—Smudge, Flash Light, and Night Sky—are all three. The embedded tension speaks to the nature of parenthood, where the innocence of youth often acts as a foil to the darkness of adult life, and vice versa. After all, who appreciates innocence less than children? 

But Bridges is no Dumas copycat. The work is brighter, literally and figuratively. There are stains of red, turquoise, and chartreuse mixed with the grays and the browns. And there are sweet postures. A girl with sharp brown bangs and a puffy white dress slips on a blue shoe. Siblings lean against each other. The words “salvation” and “reclamation” are used in Bridges’s press release. It is clear that these paintings are a spiritual salve for the artist, as, I suppose, artmaking is for most artists. That doesn’t mean it always lands with the viewer, however. But for me, it did. I drove home that night wistful for my own family, certain that my best self existed—as with Bridges’s work—at the intersection of pain and wonder, dark and light. WM

Ivan Bridges, Lantern, 2024 (Courtesy of Sade Los Angeles)

Ivan Bridges, Smudge, 2025 (Courtesy of Sade Los Angeles)