Joe Bradley: Animal Family

David Zwirner is pleased to announce 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.

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 color, 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. While related to those paintings, several tall vertical canvases that will be on view represent a notable evolution in Bradley’s work in which the human form becomes a loose organizing principle. Shades of various art-historical references and associations—from the structuring of the body in Picasso’s midcentury works to Bob Thompson’s use of line and flat planes of color—come through in these large, frontally oriented figures. Like his constant working and reworking of the formal and compositional elements in his paintings, such associations are part of Bradley’s open and deliberative method of painterly accumulation and adaptation, whereby he constantly reacts and responds to the process of creating itself.