EVERYBODY’S PERFECT

BRADLEY HARMS

SEPT 26 - DEC 5, 2026

"The paintings ask to be encountered the way you'd happen upon something half remembered from childhood, familiar in the hand before it's understood by the eye, something you'd want to hold before you'd want to explain." - Bradley Harms

LOS ANGELES, CA. Royale Projects is pleased to present Everybody's Perfect, a new body of work by Bradley Harms, on view from September 26 through December 5, 2026.

For decades, Harms has stood at the forefront of Canadian abstraction, producing paintings defined by mechanical conviction: surfaces built with the discipline of a machine, edges refined and exacted, forms that borrowed openly from the tropes of digital art. Everybody's Perfect marks a deliberate break from that practice. In its place, Harms turns to the processes of the home, cutting, dyeing, ironing, sewing, stuffing, methods long coded as domestic, to build paintings that resist the very perfection his earlier work pursued.

The results occupy an uncertain territory between serious abstract painting and familiar domestic objects. A canvas might recall a stuffed toy, or a well used sleeping bag, something remembered from childhood and returned in an unfamiliar form. Softened edges, irregular seams, and sculptural folds let the work behave less like a window and more like a thing encountered in the world: built, handled, lived with.

Underlying the shift is the question of what remains distinctly human in an era when image making technology has effectively co-opted perfection itself. Harms answers with intuition over consistency, and the intelligence of the hand over the certainty of the machine. The work shares something with metamodernism in this respect, an acceptance of postmodern doubt and deconstruction paired with a plain willingness to care, create, and hope anyway. Harms leans into the instability of painting and builds around it, making objects that acknowledge how contingent the medium has become while still betting on what it can do.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Bradley Harms was born in 1970 in Winnipeg and lives and works in Vancouver, Calgary, and Los Angeles. He received his BFA from the University of Calgary in 1996 and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. He has exhibited extensively throughout Canada and internationally, including in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Miami, Munich, Sydney, Singapore, and Tokyo, with further exhibitions across North America and Europe. His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Canada Council Art Bank (Ottawa, ON), the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (Edmonton, AB), the Nickle Arts Museum (Calgary, AB), the University of Western Sydney (Sydney, Australia), Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (Ottawa, ON), and the Glenbow Museum (Calgary, AB).