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.

IMPORT EXPORT
Galerie Sardine began in a 1701 farmhouse, but like Joe Bradley and Valentina Akerman, it is nomadic, with plans for shows in other countries. Photographed by Weston Wells.