Exhibition: Joe Bradley: Vom Abend

Bradley’s debut exhibition with the gallery features a group of new large-format paintings that build on the forms and compositional structures the artist has been exploring over the past several years.

David Zwirner is pleased to announce Vom Abend, an exhibition of new paintings by Joe Bradley at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location. This will be Bradley’s debut exhibition with David Zwirner, following the announcement of his representation by the gallery in May 2023. On view will be a group of large-format paintings that build on the forms and compositional structures Bradley has been exploring in recent years.

Developed over several years through a deliberate process of painterly accumulation and adaptation, the works in this exhibition are marked by an unassuming yet assertive sense of compositional balance whereby the interrelation of individual parts—such as patches of color, stipples of paint, and lines that at times outline shapes and forms and at others float freely—cohere into a resounding whole. As the artist notes, “I think these things couldn’t be made any other way, and there’s a sort of quality that they get from brewing and developing over time. There’s a pleasure to making a mark next to a mark that you made a year and a half ago, and a certain disconnect that happens there that I think is meaningful, that allows for a sort of forward motion. Part of what I’m looking for is a surface quality, and that’s something that you can’t arrive at in a day or a week or a month. It has to feel like it has a sort of history and that it’s been through some skirmishes.”1

Bradley worked on the paintings simultaneously, letting the process of developing each one play off of or influence the others. As a result, shared or related elements and palettes recur throughout in different and surprising ways. Modest-sized circular forms that appear in the periphery in one painting find larger, more centralized counterparts in another. Specific colors from Bradley’s lively palette of reds, blues, greens, yellows, and oranges are applied in large swaths of paint in some works and in others they are used like accents or interjections that create strong visual contrasts. Densely applied passages of speckled paint and daubs of oil provide texture and color modulation in certain areas of individual paintings, while in others the dots are larger and more sparingly applied, appearing like celestial expanses or evening skyscapes.

Though they represent a continuation of the painterly trajectory the artist has been pursuing since the middle of the 2010s, these paintings also reflect new turns in Bradley’s practice. As part of the evolution of the artist’s work over the past ten years, figurative elements have started to become more evident in these paintings than in prior ones. The subtle suggestion of faces, animal-like figures, plants, and other organic forms are legible throughout the works. Cosmic abstractions that look like moons or suns mix with eye-like shapes that recall the works of Alexander Calder or Joan Miró, and yet any figurative or stylistic references appear as part of an overall collaging of form, color, and facture without any one feature dominating. On this, Bradley says, “Abstract painting doesn’t feel totally on the nose with these anymore. There are nods and references to the world around us, and to forms and nature, and animals and plants. Those sorts of things are really starting to come to the surface. I think that’s something that interests me. The idea of things emerging. Things forming and dissolving in and on the painting.”2

Line, which had faded from Bradley’s painterly repertoire for a period of time, has reappeared in recent years—here as white and dark bands that read like pictographic overpainting in some areas, or like outlines demarcating patches of colored ground. Drawing has long been an important medium for Bradley, and his use of line in these paintings reflects the novel ways in which he has come to balance the linear and the painterly in his work.

In addition to the exhibition, David Zwirner Books will be producing a major publication on Bradley, which is scheduled to be released in 2025.
Joe Bradley (b. 1975) 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.

The artist’s inaugural solo exhibition took place at Allston Skirt Gallery, Boston, in 2002. In 2006, Bradley’s first institutional solo exhibition opened at MoMA PS1, New York. The artist’s work has since been the subject of several international exhibitions. Notably, a mid-career survey of Bradley’s work was organized in 2017 by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly known as the Albright–Knox Art Gallery) in Buffalo, New York, which later traveled to the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. In the same year, the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso organized a presentation of Bradley’s sculptures at Pablo Picasso’s former home and studio at the Château de Boisgeloup, Gisors, France. A solo exhibition of Bradley’s work was presented at Le Consortium, Dijon, France, in 2014.

Significant group exhibitions including the artist’s work have been presented at the de la Cruz Collection, Miami (2019 and 2020); The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2017 and 2018); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2015); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014); MoMA PS1, New York (2013); and Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy (2013); among others. In 2008, Bradley was selected to participate in the Whitney Biennial.

In April 2024, a solo exhibition of Bradley’s work will be presented at David Zwirner, New York. This will be the gallery’s first presentation of his work since the announcement of his representation in May 2023.

Work by the artist is held in distinguished public collections such as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York; de la Cruz Collection, Miami; 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.