Mark Bradford
Appearing as a fragment of inner-city wall, How much do your stones weigh lady? is a study in urban life and its traces. The surface of the work is composed by both accretion and effacement, the artist layering discarded print matter and paper ephemera – political posters, paste-ups, advertisements and transit maps – and then working into this ‘social index’ strata, rendering its material origins all but illegible. The result is reminiscent of the chipped paint, peeling plaster, pockmarks, and scratches that so often mark buildings in low-income and under-serviced neighbourhoods. To the artist, the patina of such surfaces becomes a notation of urban geography; a map not only of a place but of the ideological structures that shape it. “Traditionally, maps are these finite, informational tools,” Bradford says, “but in these works, they evoke questions about the individuals inhabiting these spaces, and about what these printed lines aren’t necessarily showing us.”
b.1961, Los Angeles
“The source material comes from the world,” Mark Bradford says. “I drag it into the studio, and I beat it into some form of beauty...demanding that even though the world is a violent place...there’s also a magic and an alchemy that can happen.” Described as an abstract artist, Bradford resists the late-modernist formulation the medium is the message. “Race, gender and class will always cling to the material,” he says. The stuff of life – its political, social and economic tensions, and histories – is transcribed in the hair foils, streetside advertisements, salvaged plywood fencing, and discarded newsprint that he reimagines in large-scale paintings and installations. His ‘social abstraction’ invites a more oblique engagement with Black American life, insisting on a certain opacity rather than more didactic figuration. In works of layered material and meaning, he enacts a symbolic withholding, necessitating an associative rather than prescriptive engagement with his painted surfaces. “I have the right to go to a racially charged site and decide how much I’m going to give you,” he says to the implied viewer. “And how much I’m going to keep for myself.”