Mark Bradford

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.

Mark Bradford (b. 1961 in Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) is a contemporary artist best known for his large-scale abstract paintings created out of paper. Characterized by its layered formal, material, and conceptual complexity, Bradford’s work explores social and political structures that objectify marginalized communities and the bodies of vulnerable populations. Just as essential to Bradford’s work is a social engagement practice through which he reframes objectifying societal structures by bringing contemporary art and ideas into communities with limited access to museums and cultural institutions.

• Publisher: ‎Gregory R. Miller & Co./Aspen Art Press; First Edition (March 31, 2010)
• Language: ‎English
• Hardcover: ‎160 pages
• ISBN-10: ‎0980024226
• ISBN-13: ‎9780980024227
• Item Weight: ‎2.45 pounds
• Dimensions: ‎11.3 x 0.7 x 9.2 inches