Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith – författare

Joe Bradley’s colorful and dynamic paintings invite viewers to consider the interplay between the deliberate and spontaneous, and the abstract and figurative.American artist Joe Bradley is widely recognized for his expansive visual practice that encompasses painting as well as sculpture and drawing. Over the past twenty years, Bradley has continually reinvented his approach to 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 refined and layered compositions that, as critic Roberta Smith notes, “balance gracefully between representation and abstraction.”Joe Bradley: Vom Abend/Animal Family presents work from two celebrated exhibitions at David Zwirner, in New York and London in 2024 and 2025. Bradley worked on the paintings in these two groups simultaneously, and their mutual influence is perceptible in the presence of shared or repeated colors, forms, and shapes. These paintings suggest a new turn in the artist’s practice, as figurative elements emerge as central compositional structures. Accompanying works on paper further illuminate Bradley’s multidimensional practice. An essay by art critic Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith situates this series within the artist’s larger oeuvre, discussing Bradley’s evolution in art-historical and formal terms.

Ellen Gallagher (b.1965) is one of the most celebrated painters of her generation, coming to prominence in the mid-1990s in the wake of the so-called 'culture wars' and the art world's controversial embrace of identity-politics and multiculturalism.In this in-depth look at her oeuvre, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith unpacks the complexities of her richly layered paintings, examining themes such as identity, race, displacement and the ecological environment, which Gallagher has explored throughout her work. The author takes the reader from Gallagher's early years — looking at her formative influences — through her engagement, from the late 1990s on, with the inherited modernist forms of the monochrome and the grid and with the violence and division at the root of modernism itself. Also explored are her phantasmagoric explorations of oceanic life, which draw on the discoveries of natural science, the traumatic history of the Atlantic slave trade and the speculative fictions of Afrofuturism. For anyone interested in contemporary art and the ways particular artists are expanding its borders, in form and content, this is essential reading.