Mark Bradford

It was restaged at the 55th Carnegie International.

Mark Bradford (born November 20, 1961) is an American visual artist.

Bradford was born, lives, and works in Los Angeles and studied at the California Institute of the Arts.

Recognized for his collaged painting works, which have been shown internationally, his practice also encompasses video, print, and installation.

Bradford began his studies at Santa Monica College and then transferred to the California Institute of the Arts, graduating in 1991 at 30.

He earned a BFA in 1995 and an MFA in 1997.

Bradford is known for grid-like abstract paintings combining collage with paint.

His works are made out of layers of paper and cords which he carves into using various tools and techniques, including gouging, tearing, shredding, gluing, power-washing, and sanding.

Throughout Bradford's career, he has collected ‘merchant posters’ printed sheets advertising services and posted in neighborhoods.

According to critic Sebastian Smee, “The posters advertised cheap transitional housing, foreclosure prevention, food assistance, debt relief, wigs, jobs, DNA-derived paternity testing, gun shows and quick cash, as well as legal advice for immigrants, child custody and divorce.”

Bradford sometimes incorporates ideas of masculinity and gender in his work, drawing on his experiences as a gay man.

In 2006, Bradford painted 'Scorched Earth' and 'Black Wall Street,' based on the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.

Bradford revisited the theme for his 2021 painting ‘Tulsa Gottdamn’ to mark the centennial observance of the massacre.

Bradford's collage Orbit (2007) contains a magazine image of a basketball placed at the heart of a dense lattice of Los Angeles streets.

Created by the cumulative and subtractive processes of collage and décollage, layered with paint, Orbit appears as an aerial view of a contorting, mutating, and decaying city whose tiny, intricate street grids can no longer maintain their structural integrity.

The image recalls Basquiat's iconographies of black sports heroes, but Bradford's treatment is far more ambivalent; after all, is the dream connoted by the basketball a beacon of hope or a false promise of the easiest exit from the inner city?

Bradford's A Truly Rich Man is One Whose Children Run into His Arms Even When His Hands Are Empty (2008) is nearly 9 feet wide and 9 feet tall.

According to Maxwell Heller in The Brooklyn Rail, it calls to mind the charred and shattered windshields of cars burned in riots—black, webbed with streaks of light, sleek.

He continues by saying that studying section by section offers traces of the artist's sensual, tactile process, revealing delicate layers of found material sliced and sanded, lacquered and pasted until transformed.

Bradford's practice also encompasses video, print, and installation.

His installation Mithra (2008) is a 70 x 20 x 25 ft ark constructed from salvaged plywood barricade fencing.

He shipped it to New Orleans for Prospect New Orleans, an exhibition of contemporary art commemorating Hurricane Katrina.

That same year, he created an installation inspired by Hurricane Katrina on the Steve Turner Contemporary Gallery roof, across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In 2012, Bradford narrated the soundtrack to the 30-minute, site-specific dance duet Framework by choreographer Benjamin Millepied in conjunction with the show The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

In 2015, Mark Bradford created Pull Painting 1, a site-specific wall drawing inspired by Sol LeWitt along a 60-foot wall in the Wadsworth Atheneum, as part of the museum's MATRIX 172 program.

For this, Bradford applied dense layers of vibrantly colored paper, paint, and rope.

He sanded, peeled, stripped, and cut away from the wall to create the textured composition.

The same year, Bradford created Waterfall (2015) for his exhibition titled Be Strong Boquan at Hauser & Wirth, 18th Street, New York.

Waterfall is composed of remnants of paper and rope peeled away from a pull painting, whose surface was built up by layering canvas with alternating sheets of billboard paper and rope.

Through the process of pulling string across the canvas, Bradford created long fibrous ribbons of colored paper that revealed the archaeology of its host.

Bradford was the U.S. representative for the 2017 Venice Biennale.

He was included in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in 2021.

Bradford was born and raised in South Los Angeles.

His mother rented a beauty salon in Leimert Park.

Bradford moved with his family to a largely white neighborhood in Santa Monica when he was 11, but his mother still maintained her business in the old neighborhood.

Bradford worked in her shop at times.

When Bradford graduated high school, he obtained his hairdresser's license and went to work at his mother's salon.

Also in 2017, Bradford created '150 Portrait Tone', a wall painting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The mural features the text of the 911 call by Philando Castile's girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds.

According to LACMA's website, 'The title, 150 Portrait Tone, refers to the name and color code of the pink acrylic used throughout the painting.