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Mark Bradford
A stunning mid-career retrospective
Mark Bradford is best known for dazzling, large-scale abstract paintings that examine the class-, race-, and gender-based economies that structure urban society in the United States. Gathering carefully chosen found and salvaged materials from the area surrounding his studio in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Bradford engages in an intricate artistic process that involves both creation and destruction. His complex, fractured works address pressing political issues and the media’s influence on contemporary society while cataloguing cultural change and the artist’s personal responses to societal condition.
The first major book on this leading American artist, Mark Bradford features essays by distinguished authors who investigate how Bradford straddles the line between social critique and formal innovation, playing the two against one another to produce works of seduction and analysis. Topics include Bradford’s debt to abstract expressionism, his relationship to the largely unknown history of twentieth-century abstraction by African American artists, his work as a public artist, and his interest in midcentury European collage and décollage practices.
Mark Bradford is best known for dazzling, large-scale abstract paintings that examine the class-, race-, and gender-based economies that structure urban society in the United States. Gathering carefully chosen found and salvaged materials from the area surrounding his studio in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Bradford engages in an intricate artistic process that involves both creation and destruction. His complex, fractured works address pressing political issues and the media’s influence on contemporary society while cataloguing cultural change and the artist’s personal responses to societal condition.
The first major book on this leading American artist, Mark Bradford features essays by distinguished authors who investigate how Bradford straddles the line between social critique and formal innovation, playing the two against one another to produce works of seduction and analysis. Topics include Bradford’s debt to abstract expressionism, his relationship to the largely unknown history of twentieth-century abstraction by African American artists, his work as a public artist, and his interest in midcentury European collage and décollage practices.
- GenresArt
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
About the author
Christopher Bedford
23 books2 followersChristopher Bedford is curator at the Wexner Center for the Arts.
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April 6, 2012This is the catalog for the first major exhibition of the American artist Mark Bradford.
Bradford is a collage-ist whose aesthetic is so ambitious that the finished works amount to large scale works on canvas, and sometimes free-standing bill-board paper, which could be confused for large-scale paintings. Bradford is often, strictly-speaking incorrectly, discussed as a painter.
Bradford's technique impressed me a great deal but struck me as almost masochistically torturous. He gathers bill-board and poster material from his native South Central L.A. (materials that strike him as emblematic of the neighborhood's landscape) extracts text, blows it up, then cuts out the letters, filling them with chalk, and then compliments the text with other shreds of the posters as well as other extracted items. Sometimes, the sheer number of extracted elements used to create the collages was almost mind boggling. Finally, Bradford attacks the surfaces of the collages with a "clawed instrument", carving into the canvas, and occasionally, finally, applies paint.
The exhibition commentary compared Bradford's collages to abstract expressionist painting, but I'm not sure that's a comparison I would make. His work reminded me more of the oeuvres of Jasper Johns or Basquiat than those of Pollock or Krasner. Textuality is key here.
There is also an element of landscape to Bradford's work. Being African-American and gay, he comments a lot on racial and sexual identity, and the ways in which marginalized communities are viewed and made invisible. Many of the collages are clearly meant to look like maps, topographies of societal oppression and effacement.
There is an almost post-apocalyptic quality to Bradford's art. The traces of bill-board messages seemed left over from a fallen culture.
The most ambitious work in the show was an installation piece in the form of a monumental ship. It was originally meant for the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans after the flood and was covered with the detritus of a society that had betrayed its people. It's sheer vastness suggested an arc ready to carry the ghosts of this culture's victims towards salvation.
Bradford is a collage-ist whose aesthetic is so ambitious that the finished works amount to large scale works on canvas, and sometimes free-standing bill-board paper, which could be confused for large-scale paintings. Bradford is often, strictly-speaking incorrectly, discussed as a painter.
Bradford's technique impressed me a great deal but struck me as almost masochistically torturous. He gathers bill-board and poster material from his native South Central L.A. (materials that strike him as emblematic of the neighborhood's landscape) extracts text, blows it up, then cuts out the letters, filling them with chalk, and then compliments the text with other shreds of the posters as well as other extracted items. Sometimes, the sheer number of extracted elements used to create the collages was almost mind boggling. Finally, Bradford attacks the surfaces of the collages with a "clawed instrument", carving into the canvas, and occasionally, finally, applies paint.
The exhibition commentary compared Bradford's collages to abstract expressionist painting, but I'm not sure that's a comparison I would make. His work reminded me more of the oeuvres of Jasper Johns or Basquiat than those of Pollock or Krasner. Textuality is key here.
There is also an element of landscape to Bradford's work. Being African-American and gay, he comments a lot on racial and sexual identity, and the ways in which marginalized communities are viewed and made invisible. Many of the collages are clearly meant to look like maps, topographies of societal oppression and effacement.
There is an almost post-apocalyptic quality to Bradford's art. The traces of bill-board messages seemed left over from a fallen culture.
The most ambitious work in the show was an installation piece in the form of a monumental ship. It was originally meant for the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans after the flood and was covered with the detritus of a society that had betrayed its people. It's sheer vastness suggested an arc ready to carry the ghosts of this culture's victims towards salvation.
February 24, 2013
Excellent reproductions and the most comprehensive survey of Bradford's work yet that I've seen. I always just end up confused by interviews Bradford gives, so the published "conversations" in this monograph didn't do much for me. That is probably my own failing. Robert Storr's (of course) essay is insightful and contains some good comparisons between Bradford's work and other abstract artists. However, Storr also tries out some sports metaphors at times which are HI-larious in there clumsiness. Katy Siegel's essay is quite good.
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