Martin Bradley was born in 1931 in Richmond, Surrey in England.
Since childhood he has shown great interest in art. Bradley drops out of school and, at the age of fourteen, embarks as a cabin boy where he begins painting portraits of his companions aboard the ship.
Three years later he returned to London where he studied oriental languages, literature and art history with a particular interest in the art of calligraphy.
In London Bradley met the writers group called "Angry Young Men" and became a highly regarded member.
At the end of the fifties he joined the team of artists managed by the gallery owner Rudolphe Augustinci.
In 1958, thanks to a scholarship, he moved to Brazil for three years. In 1968 he left again for India and Nepal where he studied Buddhist painting and culture. In 1989 he moved to Belgium where he still lives and works today.
Initially, his painting was mainly abstract with strong symbolic and calligraphic traces; in fact, his work has been greatly influenced and inspired by the Orient.
The cosmopolitan training of the artist is transferred to his work, the result of chromatic and cultural combinations and representations of ancient civilizations.
Martin Bradley's work is made with symbols, intended as an explicit element of his art; its purpose is to tell the stories of civilization through painting and sculpture.
Given his age at the time, he was a minor member of the CoBrA Group (a movement founded in Paris in 1948 by a group of Northern European artists in reaction to geometric abstraction and currents of social realism). His works can be found in numerous important international museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the British Museum and the Tate Gallery in London and the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice.
In 1991 he created an installation consisting of dozens of crystal sculptures for the Marco Polo Gallery in Murano.
