Mark Bradford

Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

London, The Saatchi Gallery, Abstract America: New Paintings & Sculpture at The Saatchi Gallery, 2009-10

The colours in the catalogue illustration are accurate. This work is in very good condition. There is some very minor lifting to some edges of the collaged paper elements throughout and to the extreme overturn edges, consistent with the artist's medium and method.
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"It's all about tricking the hand to take me someplace else...Your painting hand can get heavy sometimes, it gets used to certain mark making...I am always looking for ways to activate a new kind of reality. It's a very physical thing for me more than an intellectual pusuit"

The artist cited by Richard Shiff in: Exhibition Catalogue, The Ohio State University, Wexner Center for the Arts and travelling, Mark Bradford, 2010-12, p. 92

Extending in excess of three and a half metres across, the vast expanse of Mark Bradford's White Painting is the most significant work by the artist to be offered for public sale at auction, and this coincides with the major retrospective exhibition of his work that is scheduled to travel for the next two years from the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The complex evolution of this work's variegated surface is the end result of a protracted, highly considered, detailed and labour-intensive process; a repetitive cycle of addition and subtraction of a wide array of materials on and off the canvas. The final, monumental abstraction holds within its layers of methodical collage all the alluring subtlety of a white impasto by Robert Ryman, the haptic urgency of Cy Twombly, the striking thematic wall-power of Jasper Johns and the epic serenity of Yayoi Kusama. Forging together a structured geometric architecture with a poetic dispersion of colour through the torn debris of Bradford's diverse found material, White Painting encapsulates his inimitable response to the urban networks and topographies that he sees around him, which has led to the exhibition of his work in each of the Whitney, Sao Paolo and Liverpool Biennales, and garnered him the prestigious Bucksbaum award in 2006.

Mark Bradford has explained how his work is informed by such varied sources as the histories of abstraction, cartography and map-making, community networks, and the materials he uses themselves. Most famously these include used hairdresser's endpapers, used for creating permanent wave hairstyles, which Bradford appropriates and manipulated before applying to his canvas. Like much of his artistic practice, using this debris as media is informed by his own experience: his mother owned a hair salon in Los Angeles where he would help and, in fabricating the various signs for prices of different cuts, taught himself different typographies and calligraphy. Another major medium in his work emerges out of the detritus of advertising hoardings and homemade merchant posters marketing local businesses, which he mostly garners from the plywood structures and cyclone fencing that punctuate areas of Los Angeles, where he has always lived.

The snippets of textual information, the implication of lettering and photomechanical images that occasionally peep through the heavily built-up surfaces of White Painting act as a type of narrative, though certainly not as a preordained or planned story, and also suggest a certain autobiography related to the artist's processes of selection and revelation. As Bradford says of the composition of his collaged works, "I bet it says a lot about me – hiding stuff, stuff peeking though" (the artist in: "Paradox", Art:21 – Art in the Twenty-First Century, Public Broadcasting Service, 18 November, 2007). Finally, while being punctuated by startling notes of colour cast amid a vast, subtly mediating monochrome wave, White Painting is the apparent distillation of the future direction of the artist's work: "I understand transparency because of the erosion of paper. What fascinates me about surface is the way in which paper creates depth, but at the same time it still has its singular form...I'm pulling back a lot with colour in general, because at the moment I'm very interested in the relationship to line, the relationship to shape...I'm very interested in looking at structures right now" (the artist cited by Carol Eliel in: Exhibition Catalogue, The Ohio State University, Wexner Center for the Arts and travelling, Mark Bradford, 2010-12, p. 63).