Artist Center: Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford is an artist who incorporates ephemera from urban environments and situations into mixed-media works on canvas. He creates textures on the canvases to add visual interest and complexity. Bradford has worked in other mediums throughout his career, such as with pubic art, installations, and video. Though he has been known for those works, he is most well-known for his work on canvas. These works are massive pieces of art, which are abstract collages that he assembles out of signage and other materials that he collects from around his own neighborhood. His works are visually interesting and massive.

Bradford’s aesthetic language makes us of such elements as bits of billboards, homemade advertisements, string, foil, and permanent wave end-papers from beauty shops. He arranges these papers in his works by layering and he singes, sands, and bleaches the papers into brilliantly hued structures in his works. These works seem to swirl and move right before your eyes. Bradford’s works seem to lean towards and reflect his interest in the formal traditions of modernist abstraction. They also seem to reference the areas and communities from which he gathers his materials for his massive works of art. In his work you can see glimpses of text and actual imagery, but they are barely seen or legible. These works seem to represent maps, cities, and townscapes. This is seen from his use of colors, lines and what little imagery he puts into his works.

Bradford is developing a visually arresting or appealing means of representing in two dimensions the depth and relationships of the sites and streets he gathers his materials. His work’s also inform us of his personal background of living in downtown Los Angeles, with the map-like structures to his work. His works show us images of crowds and other instances throughout time. Mark Bradford’s work gives us an abstract view of life.