Biography.
Peter Bradtke is born in 1947 in Berlin. After graduation he studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg as a student of Professor Bazon Brock. First exhibitions since 1970.

In 1974 Bradtke traveles for nine weeks through the United States. The journey is documented on a four-hour Super-8 film. Inspired by the film, Bradtke produces his first landscape paintings and later, also inspired by the cine film, the first “town pictures” and “portrait landscapes.” The pictures convey time and speed, combine statics with dynamics. The media of film and panel merge into one.

Since 1982, Bradtke paints self-portraits and still lifes. The pictures are closely related to the 40s and 50′s movies, the film noir.

In 1986 Bradtke moves from Hamburg to New York. In his loft in SoHo, he creates painting for exhibitions in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. In 1994 the first city pictures of New York City arise, dynamic images of the nocturnal metropolis, painted realistic and expressive at the same time. In 1996 Bradtke opens “Studio Soho East” in Berlin. Subsequently he creates paintings of the capital with its restless nightlife. Between New York and Berlin, he is working at a book project about the interiors of bars and restaurants in Manhattan.

The works on a series of paintings that deal with the film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1919) start. Due to its skewed perspectives, and the grotesque way of light, “Caligari” affects the development of Expressionism in the German film for the next decade. (“Caligarismus”)

Since 2009, images that deal with the interaction of photography and painting arise.