EXHIBITION // JOE BRADLEY - ANIMAL FAMILY // DAVID ZWIRNER GALLERY // LONDON

© Joe Bradley- Animal Family - David Zwirner Gallery

Joe Bradley - Animal Family - June 06. to Aug. 01, 2025

David Zwirner Gallery
24 Grafton Street
London

www.davidzwirner.com

David Zwirner is pleased to present Animal Family, an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Joe Bradley at the gallery’s London location. This will be Bradley’s second exhibition with David Zwirner since the announcement of his representation in May 2023. His celebrated debut at David Zwirner New York, Vom Abend, was presented in spring 2024. In November 2025, a major survey of Bradley’s works from the past ten years will open at Kunsthalle Krems, Austria.

“I have never really felt comfortable calling myself an abstract painter. There have always been flashes of figuration in my work. For whatever reason, at this moment, I feel ready to let it all come to the surface.” — Joe Bradley

In these new paintings, figurative elements—which Bradley had begun to develop in previous works—emerge as central compositional structures. A group of horizontal paintings feature black contour lines that serve as scaffoldings for swaths of colour, floral blots of brushy paint, and scraped and stippled textural patches, which coalesce into hulking, animal-like forms that fill the surface of the support. Bradley builds up these forms until they achieve a loose balance between assembled wholes and disparate parts, establishing a dynamic tension in the work between cohesion and dissolution.

In one painting, pinkish triangles read like teeth extending along a pronounced blue-and-white snout. Lines, shapes, and blots of colour momentarily read like a tail or paw but just as quickly come to stand as distinct visual components. This figural mass rests against a black ground dotted with white, suggesting a dark, star-filled sky.

“A Joe Bradley painting is many things, but it is not for the dainty of heart. When you walk amongst his canvases you walk through a kind of dream jungle where the meaty atmosphere is mottled and streaked with sinuous filaments that may or may not cohere into something you think you recognize.” — Charles Schultz, The Brooklyn Rail.....