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拍品专文
Executed in 2002, Gonna Man dates from a pivotal moment in Mark Bradford’s early career, when the materials and visual rhythms of Los Angeles were beginning to coalesce into the distinctive language of abstraction for which he would become celebrated. Since then, Bradford has been the subject of more than 20 major solo exhibitions at museums around the world, represented the United States at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, and emerged as one of the most important painters working today.
Across its expansive surface, translucent permanent-wave end papers, printed paper and acrylic accumulate into a shifting network of lines and passages. Fields of blue and yellow emerge through the layered surface, lending the composition a vivid chromatic energy that shifts between density and transparency. In this fusion of found material, urban experience and abstraction, Bradford continues a historic post-war lineage of American painters that includes Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, while rooting that language firmly in the social and cultural fabric of Los Angeles. At once ordered and unstable, the painting recalls the gridded streets, aerial views and constantly changing urban fabric of Los Angeles. Yet Bradford’s relationship to the city extends far beyond its physical geography. From the outset, his work has absorbed the materials, language and everyday rituals of the communities around him, transforming the social texture of the city into painting.
End papers have remained central to Bradford’s practice throughout his career. In 2020, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth dedicated the exhibition Mark Bradford: End Papers to this foundational medium, examining how the humble salon material became a foundation for the artist’s visual language and broader practice. Gonna Man was among the works included, affirming its significance within this seminal series. These early end paper paintings were recognized for their significance almost from the outset: Biggie, Biggie, Biggie, a closely related 2002 end paper painting of the same dimensions as Gonna Man, entered the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that same year and his work would quickly go on to be collected by major museums including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Tate Modern, London and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
The colloquial cadence of the title Gonna Man feels rooted in spoken rather than formal language, recalling the fragments of conversation, advertising and vernacular expression that circulate through Bradford’s work. Throughout his career, he has drawn titles and imagery for his paintings from overheard phrases, popular music, merchant posters and the language encountered on the streets around him. For Bradford, the urban environment is not simply a subject to be represented but an archive to be mined: a constantly changing accumulation of words, materials, commerce and social interaction. The resulting surface becomes a kind of urban manuscript: information is buried, recovered and overwritten much as it is across the walls and streets of the city itself.
Bradford has described the decisive moment in his practice as looking beyond the hair salon toward 'the environment around me – and the language of that environment.' (M. Bradford, interview by Art21, ‘Market>Place’, Art21, originally published September 2007, republished November 2011, accessed 14 September 2026, https://art21.org/read/mark-bradford-market-place/) The city offered their own dense visual and linguistic field: advertisements for local services, handwritten signs, billboards and fragments of public communication layered one upon another. His paintings preserve these conditions while transforming them, functioning less as literal depictions of Los Angeles than as subjective records of the communities, economies and cultural exchanges that animate it.
Acquired from Patricia Faure Gallery in Santa Monica, among the galleries instrumental in supporting Bradford at the outset of his career, Gonna Man stands at the beginning of a trajectory that would fundamentally expand the possibilities of contemporary abstraction. The essential vocabulary of Bradford’s mature practice – the transformation of everyday materials, the mapping of urban experience, and the belief that abstraction can carry social and cultural memory – is already powerfully present here.
Across its expansive surface, translucent permanent-wave end papers, printed paper and acrylic accumulate into a shifting network of lines and passages. Fields of blue and yellow emerge through the layered surface, lending the composition a vivid chromatic energy that shifts between density and transparency. In this fusion of found material, urban experience and abstraction, Bradford continues a historic post-war lineage of American painters that includes Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, while rooting that language firmly in the social and cultural fabric of Los Angeles. At once ordered and unstable, the painting recalls the gridded streets, aerial views and constantly changing urban fabric of Los Angeles. Yet Bradford’s relationship to the city extends far beyond its physical geography. From the outset, his work has absorbed the materials, language and everyday rituals of the communities around him, transforming the social texture of the city into painting.
End papers have remained central to Bradford’s practice throughout his career. In 2020, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth dedicated the exhibition Mark Bradford: End Papers to this foundational medium, examining how the humble salon material became a foundation for the artist’s visual language and broader practice. Gonna Man was among the works included, affirming its significance within this seminal series. These early end paper paintings were recognized for their significance almost from the outset: Biggie, Biggie, Biggie, a closely related 2002 end paper painting of the same dimensions as Gonna Man, entered the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that same year and his work would quickly go on to be collected by major museums including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Tate Modern, London and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
The colloquial cadence of the title Gonna Man feels rooted in spoken rather than formal language, recalling the fragments of conversation, advertising and vernacular expression that circulate through Bradford’s work. Throughout his career, he has drawn titles and imagery for his paintings from overheard phrases, popular music, merchant posters and the language encountered on the streets around him. For Bradford, the urban environment is not simply a subject to be represented but an archive to be mined: a constantly changing accumulation of words, materials, commerce and social interaction. The resulting surface becomes a kind of urban manuscript: information is buried, recovered and overwritten much as it is across the walls and streets of the city itself.
Bradford has described the decisive moment in his practice as looking beyond the hair salon toward 'the environment around me – and the language of that environment.' (M. Bradford, interview by Art21, ‘Market>Place’, Art21, originally published September 2007, republished November 2011, accessed 14 September 2026, https://art21.org/read/mark-bradford-market-place/) The city offered their own dense visual and linguistic field: advertisements for local services, handwritten signs, billboards and fragments of public communication layered one upon another. His paintings preserve these conditions while transforming them, functioning less as literal depictions of Los Angeles than as subjective records of the communities, economies and cultural exchanges that animate it.
Acquired from Patricia Faure Gallery in Santa Monica, among the galleries instrumental in supporting Bradford at the outset of his career, Gonna Man stands at the beginning of a trajectory that would fundamentally expand the possibilities of contemporary abstraction. The essential vocabulary of Bradford’s mature practice – the transformation of everyday materials, the mapping of urban experience, and the belief that abstraction can carry social and cultural memory – is already powerfully present here.