RY DAVID BRADLEY: 2025 BC

Carl Kostyál is delighted to present the ‘2025 BC’, the third solo exhibition of Ry David Bradley (b. 1979, Melbourne, now based in Paris) with the gallery, and his debut in London.

February 14 - March 8, 2025

“The future came too fast. Images untethered from hands, meaning unmoored from matter. The body, obsolete. But Ry David Bradley pulls history forward like a rope fraying at the edges, refusing to let it snap. He paints—not to preserve, not to mourn, but to provoke. Thick oil vibrating with the tension of those who came before — Kossoff, Auerbach, the ones who clawed vision from matter. But this is not their century, and this is not their fight. Bradley is not painting in their shadow; he is painting in their wake, where their urgency meets his own.

He does not retreat from the digital. The machine is here, and he engages it head-on. Elsewhere in the show, his digital paintings gleam with a weightless finality, sealed not by varnish but by code—unchangeable, authenticated, locked in the cold perfection of blockchain logic. No brushwork, no hesitation. They are present, but untouchable, staking their claim in a world where proof is currency and aura is an afterthought.

This is the hinge. A moment between worlds. A forthcoming solo show at the Lyon Housemuseum in 2025 will make it monumental, but here, in 2025 BC, the battle is laid bare. Bradley does not resolve it. He does not need to. What matters is the friction—the moment where oil and pixel, flesh and data, history and speculation refuse to collapse into one another.

This is painting in the long shadow of automation. This is digital work haunted by the specter of touch. The machine will learn. It will refine, it will predict, it will outperform. But it will never doubt. And in that failure, it will never be human.” — J.S. Fournier