JUDITH SHAW

Off the Wall

March 6 - April 11, 2026

Bruno David is pleased to present Off the Wall by New York–born, St. Louis–based multimedia artist Judith Shaw. This marks Shaw’s second exhibition with the gallery. In conjunction with the exhibition, Bruno David Gallery will publish a catalogue of the artists’ work, featuring an in-depth exhibition history and bibliography.

Off the Wall is created from layered paint fragments collected from the flood wall in downtown St. Louis during Paint Louis, the city’s annual graffiti mural event. Each year, as artists prepare their assigned sections, many scrape away encrusted layers of paint left behind from prior iterations. These discarded remnants—compressed histories of gesture, color, and narrative— become the primary material of Shaw’s work.

Shaw was drawn to the fragments scattered across the ground, their surfaces warped by heat and sun. Misshapen yet resilient, fragile yet dense, the pieces carry visible traces of accumulated energy and emotion. Gritty and grimy, some embedded with stones and debris, the fragments reveal unexpected moments of raw beauty and organic simplicity. Their layered skins function as both record and residue—evidence of cycles of creation, erasure, and renewal.

As in much of her practice, Shaw gathers what speaks to her intuitively and brings it into the studio, where she looks, waits, and experiments—allowing the material to guide its own becoming. Collected over several years of the Paint Louis event, these fragments embody impermanence while resisting extinction. Once reconfigured, they shift from detritus to form, inhabiting a space between sculpture and painting, artifact and abstraction.

Collectively, the pieces blur the boundary between art and life, challenging traditional notions of fine art and aligning with ideas introduced by the Arte Povera movement in Italy in the 1960s.

The artist wants to acknowledge and honor the graffiti artists whose layered, weathered work forms the foundation of this project. The fragments that became her medium began as intentional acts of creative expression. They carry the histories and voices of the artists who first brought them into being.