This summer David Zwirner will present an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Joe Bradley (b. 1975, Maine, US) at the gallery’s London location in Mayfair. It is Bradley’s second exhibition with David Zwirner since the announcement of his representation in May 2023, following his celebrated debut at David Zwirner New York, Vom Abend, in Spring 2024.
Internationally acclaimed for an expansive visual practice that encompasses painting, drawing, and sculpture, over the past twenty years Bradley has consistently reinvented his approach to his art, from modular minimalist-style paintings and sculptures to rough-hewn, heavily worked surfaces featuring pictographic and abstract elements.
Bradley’s first show at Zwirner, Vom Abend, showcased a series of large-format paintings that continued his exploration of form and composition with densely applied passages of speckled paint and daubs of oil, creating textures that suggest celestial or evening skyscapes.
In his upcoming show, figurative elements, which Bradley had begun to develop in previous works, emerge as central compositional structures. The pieces feature black contour lines that serve as scaffoldings for swaths of color, floral blots of brushy paint, and scraped and stippled textural patches – pushing his work into a distinctive new direction.
Animal Family opens at David Zwirner, London, on 6 June - the opening night of London Gallery Weekend 2025. In November 2025, a major survey of Bradley’s works from the past ten years will open at Kunsthalle Krems, Austria.
It’s so great to be able to speak. I have been a fan of your work for some time, having first seen your solo show Day World with Gagosian in London in 2018. I wanted to start this interview by asking you to introduce your forthcoming exhibition with David Zwirner opening on June 6th, 2025. How long have you been working on this project and what works will be included in the show?
I’ve been working on the show for about a year, although some of the paintings have been kicking around the studio for the past few. The title of the show is Animal Family, it will include thirteen new paintings and a group of drawings. There’s a push towards figuration in this new work that I find exciting, particularly in a suite of five tall vertical paintings. These ones are pretty explicitly based on the human form. The body has been present in my work in the past, but it has always been sublimated in a way that maybe I can see, but is kind of buried for the viewer. Then there’s a sort of animal-like form that pops up in a couple of paintings. You know, I thought… We’ve been painting bulls and horses and this sort of thing for a long time… so as a motif, it is tried and true.
For a long time, indeed. Have you visited Lascaux Cave in France? There is the famous Hall of the Bulls there, but there are many examples of prehistoric cave paintings that include bulls, equine, and other animal forms, such as The Cave of Altamira in Spain. These sites and their artworks have in a way become an urtext for painting. Are they an influence for you?
I have a number of books on the subject, but I've never actually visited one of the caves.
And what about Animal Family, is there a particular reason for that title? Did it come from a particular place?
I went through a few titles while putting this show together. For awhile it was ‘Late Work,’ which I thought was funny, but too morbid. Then the working title was 'Animal Shapes', which I borrowed from David Berman, and that kind of morphed into Animal Family. I think it rolls off the tongue a bit better. The titles for my shows or paintings aren't meant to illustrate a point, but to create a sort of ambiance for the work to live in. That said, there is something about this group of paintings, there's a sense that they're a family or a gang or something. They belong together.
Something that has defined your career is a consistent movement through different formal and material languages of painting. These bodies of work—whether your modular paintings of the mid-2000s or the following series of Schmagoo paintings, through to more gestural abstraction through the 2010s—can often take many years to work through and refine for an exhibition. For instance, in your most recent show at David Zwirner New York in 2024, Vom Abend, you worked on around thirty paintings simultaneously for years: coming to things, leaving things, having time to muse, having space for nonlinear thinking. I wonder whether it’s been a similar case for this show—do you see the works in Animal Family as distinct from Vom Abend, or do you feel as though they have emerged in tandem or evolved out of it?
I think of the paintings in Animal Family as a pretty seamless continuation of those in Vom Abend. The way that I work, typically I’ll have a group of paintings in progress leading up to an exhibition, and there’s usually five or six that either don’t feel right for the show or just haven't been resolved in time. These make for a breadcrumb trail to the next group and create a kind of natural progression. So even though the paintings in Animal Family have qualities that might distinguish them from those in Vom Abend, I think you could hang them together and they would make sense.
And where did the pull come to lean into figuration? There’s still plenty of abstraction and experimentation happening here, and in the past, you have been no stranger to figuration —although perhaps in a more oblique fashion—such as the modular paintings, or even the profiles and eyes one can intuit in Vom Abend. But to use the full human figure as a scribe for the composition of an abstract painting seems new?
Well, there was a painting in the last show titled Angel’s Trumpet (2024) in which the female form emerged, sort of a big pink Venus. She was hard to miss. The painting was a bit of an outlier, but I felt it jibed with the others and added something to show. Angel’s Trumpet pointed the way for this new group of paintings and granted permission, if you will, to move forward. Really, the whole thing is driven by intuition and desire. If I wanna try something out in the studio, it may not always work, but I need to give myself the freedom to follow my nose.
In an interview that you gave recently for your 2022 Xavier Hufkens show in Brussels, New Paltz, you mention having a desire to merge your drawing practice with your painting practice. These things are never fully separated in the way we think and feel about what we make, but in terms of the formal language, perhaps bringing those things closer together is happening for the new works in Animal Family. The use of a certain kind of line language as a composition tool.
For me, drawing is more or less a casual thing. The stakes are so low working with pencil and paper, and it’s so much easier than painting, that it lends itself to a kind of risk-taking that is harder to pull off on canvas. I’ve always felt that my drawings are somehow out ahead of my paintings, that there are moves I make on paper that for whatever reason I don’t feel comfortable incorporating into the paintings. And I guess at a certain point it’s like: well, why not? What have I got to lose? So, yeah, there is a desire to join the two, and I think it’s visible in the work. Drawing is very much present in these paintings in a way that it wasn’t in my last London show.
You’ve mentioned channeling intuition and desire, a kind of liberated action or gesture. But on the other hand, I see a kind of problem-solving approach. Coming back to the canvas after fallow periods in the studio, ruminating and working over long periods. They are intuitive and spontaneous, but there’s also time, reflection, and non-linear thinking built into the process, using materiality to work with form or form to help with the application and texture of paint.
When I’m working on a painting, the first half of the process is more or less free improvisation. Just fooling around with paint and seeing where it goes. This is kind of like planting seeds, but also setting little traps and creating obstacles to encounter further down the road. When the painting begins to take shape, it’s more about refining the thing and pushing to turn it into a cohesive picture, to give it a sense of structure and balance. It kind of engages both sides of the brain.
Having the luxury to work on these things over long periods, to be able to step away from a painting is essential to the way they come together. It has something to do with losing contact with the painting. If the signal goes cold, I can look at it again with fresh eyes and I might see some potential or simply know what to do with it next. So often, I’ll put a painting away and hide it from myself for a while. If I feel too attached to a painting, it becomes difficult to go back into it. Also, there is a certain texture and surface quality I’m shooting for that can only happen over time. It’s not something I can arrive at in a day or a week.
In many of your works, there appears to be a range of application techniques—from paint applied with brushwork to oil stick, through to what can look like a soiled rag, sponge, or other studio ephemera. Is the reason for this to achieve the textural result you’re looking for? Or, moreover, is it about deliberately removing an element of the artist’s hand—a rejection of an overly humanized approach to the painting or to the reading of the picture?
These paintings are all executed with brush and oil paint. I might draw into the painting with chalk or pencil, but that usually gets lost. I want the delivery to be really straightforward, nothing fancy. I do scrape away quite a bit at the surface. Once the paint is dry, I'll go in with a flat knife and rough it up. Sometimes this exposes the underpainting and leads to some interesting passages. I try to pay attention to every inch of the surface. It’s important that it is my hand, that the painting has passed through my body to become what it is. I’m happy to cop to that, to authorship or whatever.
This removal of the physical act, the body and process of painting can be seen in less visceral, more hazy approaches to painting. Artists such as Katherine Bernhardt, for instance. In many ways, her works have a connection with those in Animal Family—large-scale works with punchy, animated characters and flat, bold passages of colour.
I love Katherine’s work. There's a freewheeling spontaneity in the way she paints. She makes it look easy, and you get the sense that it just pours out of her. I don’t think you could get that same feeling standing in front of my paintings. I’m much more uptight. I need to suffer a bit. I want my work to have a kind of plodding, start-stop tempo, and there is a stiffness to them too. I want them to feel kind of rigid.
This plodding tempo resonates with the clear, pastoral, farmlike themes in Animal Family. Beyond several animal figures themselves, we see a number of rural horizon lines, clear blue skies, and floral motifs. Was there a particular feeling that brought you to this?
Well, I live in New York City, so I’m trapped in this big, dense, noisy, dirty machine. There's something appealing about making a painting that has a rural, pastoral quality to it while being surrounded by all of this junk.
You’ve mentioned the idea of working with or through established motifs, and throughout your practice, there are numerous connections to—and subversions of—canonical figures and movements in the history of painting, such as the abstract, cartoon language of Guston, the rawness of Dubuffet, and the line work of Twombly. The press release for the show highlights two influences in particular: Bob Thompson and Picasso. I wonder if you might speak about these two specifically?
Bob Thompson’s a painter that I've been interested in for a long time. He was a fantastic colorist. I really respond to the keyed-up psychedelic palette in his work. And there's something in the way he painted the human body in technicolor, it feels somehow spiritualized. But Picasso, I mean, it’s perverse to incorporate his influence. It feels almost sacrilegious. And the bar is set so high with Picasso that I know I’ll fall flat, which could be good for a laugh. It’s kind of irresistible in a way. Picasso left all of these toys around for us to play with.
It’s nice to hear you mention the potential humour of your work, which again has me thinking of artists such as Katherine or Rose Wylie in the UK. Both these artists have a humor to their work, Katherine’s seems to be a saccharine irony, whereas Wylie’s is more rude and mischievous. But in both cases, there is a wry self-awareness, which is something your work has held for a long time. The works for Animal Family retain this but in a certain lighthearted or whimsical nature – is humour something you are trying to embed directly into the work?
It’s certainly something that I welcome, though I’m not sure that humor is so easy to broadcast through painting. You know what I mean? I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve laughed out loud in front of a painting, and I wouldn’t expect anyone to crack up in front of one of mine. But I think having a sense of levity or a lighthearted quality, as you say, might set the tone for the viewer to enjoy it and not take it too seriously.
To end the conversation, I wanted to ask about your upcoming survey show at Kunsthalle Krems in Austria in November. Is there anything you can tell us about what will be included in the show?
Sure, the show is being organized with Florian Steininger, the Director of Kunsthalle Krems. The museum is maybe an hour outside of Vienna and the exhibition will focus on showcasing paintings produced since about 2018, but it will also include drawings and small sculptures. There will be some new works too. I’m really looking forward to it.
The full interview is featured in Issue 13 of émergent magazine, launching during Art Basel 2025 later this month. Plus, plan your visit to see the exhibition, Bradley’s second with #DavidZwirner following his acclaimed 2024 debut in New York, through Friday, August 1
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Joe Bradley (b. 1975) is widely recognized for his expansive visual practice that encompasses painting as well as sculpture and drawing. Over the past twenty years, Bradley has constantly reinvented his approach to his art, creating a distinctive body of work that has ranged from modular, minimalist-style paintings and sculptures to rough-hewn, heavily worked surfaces featuring pictographic and abstract elements to recent refined and layered compositions. The artist has consistently explored the possibilities of certain formal elements—such as line and, above all, color—combining references that are art historical, cultural, and personal to create work that is characterized by a vivid interplay between the formally composed and considered, and the spontaneous and instinctive. Bradley was born in Kittery, Maine, and received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999. He presently lives and works in New York. Work by the artist is held in distinguished public collections such as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; George Economou Collection, Athens; Hall Art Foundation, Reading, Vermont; Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Charlie Mills (b. 1994) is an independent curator, writer and critic based in London, he graduated with an MA in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths in 2018, having previously completed his BA in History of Art at Goldsmiths in 2016. Since 2017 he has worked as Artist Liaison for Hannah Barry Gallery and Bold Tendencies. In 2019 Charlie founded his own not-for-profit publishing house, Kronos Publishing, focusing on small-run exhibition catalogues and artist monographs.
Charlie has written exhibition catalogues for Quench Gallery, Margate (2021); Foolscap Editions, London (2020); Gentrified Underground, Zürich (2019); Camberwell College of Arts, London (2019); William Bennington Gallery, London (2019); Elam Publishing, London (2018); and Hannah Barry Gallery, London (2018 & 2019). As well as articles for ArteViste, Saatchi Art & Music Magazine, HIX Magazine and Berfoirs, and continues to write directly for a number of UK-based artists.
