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Descriptif du lot
Marbled fragments of black, white and lilac-grey swirl and ripple across Farther South and Elsewhere (2015), a monumental work by Mark Bradford. It invites myriad readings, appearing like a muscular abstraction, a snowy mountainside, a weather map or a landscape seen from the sky. Branching, centrifugal veins of colour create areas of subtle shadow and graphic contrast, oscillating between figure and ground. The work was made by laying saturated sheets of carbon paper onto a white canvas. They leave pale ghosts of their wrinkled texture, and dark, glossy accretions where the carbon-solvent layer remains adhered to the surface. The composition’s play of light, darkness, erasure and movement is not merely formal. Bradford’s title ‘Farther South and Elsewhere’ comes from a chapter in the book Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (2000) by historians John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger. In this groundbreaking study of slave resistance and escape in the pre-Civil War American South, the authors dispel the myth that slaves were passive, docile or accepting of their fate.
Bradford is renowned for his unique mode of ‘social abstraction’. He uses posters, coloured paper, string, caulking and other materials—all sourced from the street or the hardware store—to create complex, richly layered paintings that engage with societal and political structures. A lifelong Los Angeles native, his understanding of community and creativity was informed early on by his work in his mother’s hair salon. It was not until he was thirty that Bradford enrolled at CalArts, earning his master’s degree there in 1997. He created early works using perming endpapers, singeing their edges and layering the translucent sheets into grids that recalled Minimalist paintings. Where his subsequent works became increasingly dense and colourful—with media built up and excavated in near-geological layers—Farther South and Elsewhere revisits this more painterly and ethereal mood. Bradford debuted the carbon-paper staining method in Lazy Mountain (2014), a titanic twelve-metre work created for his first Asian museum exhibition, Tears of a Tree, at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum in 2015: related paintings were included in Scorched Earth, his show at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, later that year.
Bradford’s works have explored issues ranging from the changing environment of Los Angeles to Black masculinity, racial violence, the AIDS crisis and economic exploitation, both historical and contemporary. Yet none of these themes are made explicit. It is only when the viewer looks deeply—understanding the functional materials from which the works are made, and reading the text of their titles—that their embedded social and emotional meanings unfold. ‘One of the ideas that I’m really interested in promoting is that we, like any other people, can and should be allowed to be private and not have to explain our stories through figuration,’ Bradford told Anita Hill in a 2018 interview. ‘We should have the right to be abstract. Why not?’ (M. Bradford in conversation with A. Hill, in Mark Bradford, London 2018, p. 18).
In its refusal of the straightforward reveal, Farther South and Elsewhere is able to point in a range of directions. If its forms evoke a mountain, they also conjure an aerial seascape, as in Bradford’s scoured carbon-paper painting A Siren Beside a Ship (2014, Art Institute of Chicago), which stirs with dark histories of colonisation and the Middle Passage. Overlaying a macro perspective with the micro, the work’s shards of colour also recall a tissue sample seen under magnification. Bradford’s Scorched Earth exhibition included a suite of abstract paintings based on microscope images of AIDS cells. The body, in his work, can be biological, political, and even tectonic.
Carbon paper was widely used in the twentieth century to create ‘carbon copies’ in tandem with the inscription of an original document by hand or typewriter. With the rise of word processing it has become almost obsolete, only being used for handwritten receipts, packing slips and in other specialist situations. Bradford’s use of the material gestures toward a fading material aspect of the economy, but also finds new poetic potential in the carbon paper’s blackness, its texture, and its ability to leave a trace. ‘To use the whole social fabric of our society as a point of departure for abstraction reanimates it, dusts it off’, he says. ‘It becomes really interesting to me, and supercharged’ (M. Bradford, ‘Clyfford Still’s Paintings’, in The Artist Project: What Artists See When They Look at Art, New York 2017, p. 46).
Bradford is renowned for his unique mode of ‘social abstraction’. He uses posters, coloured paper, string, caulking and other materials—all sourced from the street or the hardware store—to create complex, richly layered paintings that engage with societal and political structures. A lifelong Los Angeles native, his understanding of community and creativity was informed early on by his work in his mother’s hair salon. It was not until he was thirty that Bradford enrolled at CalArts, earning his master’s degree there in 1997. He created early works using perming endpapers, singeing their edges and layering the translucent sheets into grids that recalled Minimalist paintings. Where his subsequent works became increasingly dense and colourful—with media built up and excavated in near-geological layers—Farther South and Elsewhere revisits this more painterly and ethereal mood. Bradford debuted the carbon-paper staining method in Lazy Mountain (2014), a titanic twelve-metre work created for his first Asian museum exhibition, Tears of a Tree, at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum in 2015: related paintings were included in Scorched Earth, his show at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, later that year.
Bradford’s works have explored issues ranging from the changing environment of Los Angeles to Black masculinity, racial violence, the AIDS crisis and economic exploitation, both historical and contemporary. Yet none of these themes are made explicit. It is only when the viewer looks deeply—understanding the functional materials from which the works are made, and reading the text of their titles—that their embedded social and emotional meanings unfold. ‘One of the ideas that I’m really interested in promoting is that we, like any other people, can and should be allowed to be private and not have to explain our stories through figuration,’ Bradford told Anita Hill in a 2018 interview. ‘We should have the right to be abstract. Why not?’ (M. Bradford in conversation with A. Hill, in Mark Bradford, London 2018, p. 18).
In its refusal of the straightforward reveal, Farther South and Elsewhere is able to point in a range of directions. If its forms evoke a mountain, they also conjure an aerial seascape, as in Bradford’s scoured carbon-paper painting A Siren Beside a Ship (2014, Art Institute of Chicago), which stirs with dark histories of colonisation and the Middle Passage. Overlaying a macro perspective with the micro, the work’s shards of colour also recall a tissue sample seen under magnification. Bradford’s Scorched Earth exhibition included a suite of abstract paintings based on microscope images of AIDS cells. The body, in his work, can be biological, political, and even tectonic.
Carbon paper was widely used in the twentieth century to create ‘carbon copies’ in tandem with the inscription of an original document by hand or typewriter. With the rise of word processing it has become almost obsolete, only being used for handwritten receipts, packing slips and in other specialist situations. Bradford’s use of the material gestures toward a fading material aspect of the economy, but also finds new poetic potential in the carbon paper’s blackness, its texture, and its ability to leave a trace. ‘To use the whole social fabric of our society as a point of departure for abstraction reanimates it, dusts it off’, he says. ‘It becomes really interesting to me, and supercharged’ (M. Bradford, ‘Clyfford Still’s Paintings’, in The Artist Project: What Artists See When They Look at Art, New York 2017, p. 46).