Ry David Bradley (b. 1979, Melbourne) lives and works in Paris. He took an MFA at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, and studied new media, video and internet art in the early 2000s, believing it to be the medium of his generation. He has never worked with a brush on canvas. Instead he makes what he calls Classical Digital: framed tapestries woven from acrylic thread using a 1970s Japanese technique that reached the highest resolution possible in tapestry before digital printing made the method obsolete in the 1980s, with dyes heated into the woven surface and spray paint laid over the digital source. In 2009 he founded the site Painted, Etc., on how digital technology was reshaping art. The recent work sets Byzantine creatures and mythological beings against what new machines can do now, and the friction between oil and pixel, touch and automation, is the subject rather than a problem to be resolved.
His solo exhibition Epoch opened at the Lyon Housemuseum in Melbourne in 2025. Other solo exhibitions include 2025 BC at Carl Kostyál, London (2025), Novacene: Portraits of a Machine at The Hole, New York, Moonlight Painting at Gana Art Nineone, Seoul, and Stages and Gen at Sullivan+Strumpf. His work has been shown at the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art in a two person exhibition with Jon Rafman, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków, at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, at the National Gallery of Victoria, at Kunsthaus Erfurt and in Clear History at Perrotin, Paris, curated by Oli Epp (2025). His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art and the Lyon Housemuseum, and he has received the Myer Foundation Award.
In 2023 Bradley took part in the group exhibition Tutti Frutti 2 at Plan X Capri.
