Mark Bradford

Erase. Erase and reclaim. Erase memory, reclaim history. Erase the past, recall the present.
These are the words that come to mind while thinking of Mark Bradford's work: a work built--literally, physically built--through a methodical process of erasure. Bradford has invented for himself a method of creative destruction.
Bradford is an object and image maker. Most of the time, but not all the time, his objects end up hanging on a wall. I am resisting calling his work paintings; I am resisting calling Bradford a painter. His art carries the memory of some paintings, and he himself, I believe, values the voices of some painters. But nevertheless, what he does defies in my eyes a certain history of representation that painting, representational or not, figurative or abstract, has historically embodied. I do not mean by this that Bradford programmatically intends to position his work against a specific medium, or even attempts to revive, debunk or dismantle a conversation about the living pulse of painting today.
The question just does not register. We are talking here about something else. Bradford makes art. And art is no more synonymous with painting than painting is synonymous with art. Bradford is elaborating a form, an object that will match the subject he is addressing.
Bradford is some sort of archeologist, an archaeologist of the instant, of the present. A present captured with a split-second delay.
Philippe Vergne, excerpted from Mark Bradford: Merchant Posters.

Erase. Erase and reclaim. Erase memory, reclaim history. Erase the past, recall the present.
These are the words that come to mind while thinking of Mark Bradford's work: a work built--literally, physically built--through a methodical process of erasure. Bradford has invented for himself a method of creative destruction.

Philippe Vergne, excerpted from Mark Bradford: Merchant Posters.

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Mark Bradford: Merchant Posters Text by Malik Gaines, Ernest Hardy, Philippe Vergne, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson. This book gathers for the first time an extensive selection of American artist—or builder and demolisher,” as he describes himself—Mark Bradford's gorgeous, searing and heavily textured merchant posters.” The original printed
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GREGORY R. MILLER & CO./ASPEN ART PRESS
ISBN: 9780980024227
$50.00 | In stock

Mark Bradford

"Bradford is some sort of archeologist, an archaeologist of the instant, of the present. A present captured with a split-second delay."

Philippe Vergne, excerpted from Mark Bradford: Merchant Posters.


Featured image is "Untitled (Corner of Desire and Piety)," 2008, reproduced from Mark Bradford: Merchant Posters.

Mark Bradford: Merchant Posters

Text by Malik Gaines, Ernest Hardy, Philippe Vergne, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson.
Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co./Aspen Art Press

This book gathers for the first time an extensive selection of American artist—or “builder and demolisher,” as he describes himself—Mark Bradford's gorgeous, searing and heavily textured “merchant posters.” The original printed posters, collected by Bradford from around his Central Los Angeles neighborhood, are brightly colored local advertisements that target the area's vulnerable lower-income residents. For Bradford, they serve as both the formal and conceptual underpinnings of his works on paper, décollages/collages that engage with the pressures of the cityscape. “The sheer density of advertising creates a psychic mass, an overlay that can sometimes be very tense or aggressive,” he notes; “If there's a 20-foot wall with one advertisement for a movie about war, then you have the repetition of the same image over and over—war, violence, explosions, things being blown apart. As a citizen, you have to participate in that every day. You have to walk by until it's changed.” Eagerly anticipated, this is the first large-scale publication by a major publisher about the work of this important and increasingly influential artist. Artist and writer Malik Gaines considers Bradford's play with signs in relation to literary and performative theories of African-American forms; writer and cultural critic Ernest Hardy addresses social issues, in Los Angeles and more broadly, raised by Bradford's source material; Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson examines the language in the work as it relates to Concrete poetry; and Dia Art Foundation Director Philippe Vergne looks at the surface of the work and Bradford's processes of mining and excavation.