Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford (Los Angeles, 1961) is currently acknowledged as one of the names that best defined painting of the last two decades, by creating his own pictorial language to talk about universal themes, such as the distribution of power within societal structures and its impact on the individual or the relationship between art and community engagement. In his work, the social element is given through his choice of materials. Using everyday materials and tools found in hardware stores, Bradford created a unique artistic language. Often referred to as “social abstraction”, his work is rooted on the understanding that all materials and techniques are embedded with a meaning that precedes their artistic utility. His signature style developed out of his experimentation with endpapers, the small, translucent papers used in hairdressers, but he has since experimented with other types of paper, including maps, billboards, film posters, comic books and ‘merchant posters’ advertising predatory services in economically distressed neighbourhoods. Through this rigorously physical approach to the material presence of painting, Bradford has been addressing crucial issues of our time, such as the AIDS epidemic; the misrepresentation and fear of queer and homosexual identity; systemic racism in the United States; and more recently, the Covid-19 crisis.