Exceptional Works: Joe Bradley

American artist Joe Bradley (b. 1975) is widely recognized for his expansive visual practice that encompasses painting, sculpture, and drawing. His body of work has ranged from a modular, minimalist style to rough-hewn, heavily worked surfaces and refined, layered compositions that, as critic Roberta Smith notes, “balance gracefully between representation and abstraction.”

Country Heel (2025) is from a group of paintings debuted in Animal Family, the artist’s 2025 solo exhibition at David Zwirner London. In November 2025, a major survey of his work from the past ten years will open at Kunsthalle Krems, Austria.

In Country Heel, figurative elements—which Bradley had begun to develop in previous paintings—emerge as central compositional structures. One of several horizontal compositions in the show, this painting features black contour lines and shapes that serve as scaffolding for swaths of color, floral blots of brushy paint, and scraped and stippled textural patches; these coalesce into hulking, animal-like forms that fill the surface of the canvas. Bradley builds up these forms until they achieve a loose balance between an assembled whole and disparate parts, establishing tension in the work between cohesion and dissolution.

Bradley’s work is held in distinguished public collections including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

His work has been included in important group exhibitions 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); and MoMA PS1, New York (2013). In 2008, Bradley was selected to participate in the Whitney Biennial.

In November 2025, a major survey exhibition will open at Kunsthalle Krems. Featuring approximately seventy works from the last ten years including paintings, drawings, and sculpture, this will be Bradley’s first museum exhibition in Austria.