MARK BRADFORD

Working across media from painting and collage to video, he draws inspiration from his surroundings often using materials such as billboard posters, street signage, and end papers from his mother’s hair salon to create layered compositions that hover between abstraction, mapping, and political and social commentary. He is widely recognised for works including Black Venus (2005), an early breakthrough painting that weaves beauty-salon materials and merchant posters into a densely collaged field, and Helter Skelter I (2007), a vast, map-like canvas in the collection of The Broad in Los Angeles. His work has been presented in major solo exhibitions at institutions such as Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin and shown internationally by representing galleries including Hauser & Wirth. Bradford’s honours range from the 2009 MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ to representing the United States at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.

Early life and Career

Bradford’s art practice is closely tied to his own history as a Black artist from Los Angeles. Born in South Los Angeles in 1961, he spent much of his childhood in his mother’s beauty salon, Foxy Hair, in Leimert Park, a historically Black neighbourhood whose social life continues to shape both his materials and his community-focused projects. His adolescence unfolded against the background of the AIDS crisis, the crack cocaine epidemic, and rising violence and policing in the city, sharpening his sense of how race, class, and health structure everyday experience. After high school, he worked in the salon, immersed himself in nightclub and drag cultures in Los Angeles and travelled to Europe, before enrolling at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where he completed a BFA in 1995 and an MFA in 1997 under the mentorship of Conceptual artist Charles Gaines.

Relationship with Art History

At CalArts, Bradford was drawn to Abstract Expressionism, and critics have noted how his accumulations of found material echo Robert Rauschenberg‘s Combines, how his heroic, all-over canvases recall the scale and energy of Jackson Pollock‘s drip paintings, and how his inscribed, scarred surfaces suggest Cy Twombly‘s graffito-like marks; yet his skepticism about painting’s supposed purity ultimately led him toward the materially dense, socially grounded abstraction that defines his mature practice.

Materials and methods of Social Abstraction

On his solo show Thievery by Servants (19 February–4 April 2026) at Lévy Gorvy Dayan in New York, Bradford remarked, ‘I want my materials to actually have the memories—the cultural, personal memories that are lodged in the object. You can’t erase history, no matter what you do. It bleeds through’.

For his materials, Bradford mainly draws from the streets that surround his South-Central Los Angeles studio, using posters, flyers, and other street signage reflective of local economies for his large-scale collages. In Daddy, Daddy, Daddy (2001)—in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—layers of scorched permanent-wave end papers and hair-dye cellophane create an irregular grid where translucent colour suggests intimacy and nostalgia, while the burned beauty materials and obsessive, manual process recall the pressures of imposed beauty standards and connect to Bradford’s own history and the politics of Black hair. Calling his work a form of ‘social abstraction’, he positions it between art history and everyday life, transforming common ephemera into reflections on how Black and other marginalised communities experience space, power, and erasure.

Bradford’s signature large-scale canvases are built through an additive and subtractive process: sheets of printed paper are glued, sanded, cut, and peeled or pulled back (often using embedded rope) to create multi-layered, topographical surfaces that can resemble aerial maps, weather systems, or scarred ground. Viewers encounter fragments of typography, grids, and colour fields that allude to city streets, maps, or redlining-inflected zones of conflict, making the paintings read simultaneously as abstract fields and as documents of social and historical forces. Scorched Earth (2006), held at The Broad in Los Angeles, exemplifies his approach: its dark, cratered surface responds to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, with layers of paint and paper scraped back to evoke both burnt architecture and the erasure of Black histories from public memory. In Pickett’s Charge (2017) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Bradford reworked reproductions of Paul Philippoteaux’s 19th-century cyclorama of the Battle of Gettysburg, cutting, collaging, and overpainting the images into a continuous, immersive frieze nearly 400 feet long that turns a heroic Civil War narrative into a fractured meditation on truth, representation, and the persistence of conflict.

Bradford’s Monumental Site-Responsive Projects

Bradford has developed ambitious installations and site-specific projects across museum and gallery spaces that extend his interest in mapping and social space. For Masses and Movements at Hauser & Wirth Menorca in 2021, he presented globe sculptures, a site-specific wall painting, and canvases based on a 16th-century world map thought to feature the first printed use of the name ‘America’, alongside an education initiative focused on immigration and local communities. In Mark Bradford. Keep Walking at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin (2024–25), he expanded this vocabulary of grids, cuts, and colour in paintings, sculptures, installations, and video tracing routes of migration and colonial expansion, juxtaposing fractured cartographic forms with signs of protest and state power. Across such work, his richly layered compositions conjure shifting terrains and contested borders, underscoring how journeys across land are entangled with fear, possibility, and geopolitical power.

Politics and Social Practice Through Art + Practice

Bradford has never shied away from politics, and the materials he uses are saturated with the realities of race and class, resulting in work that moves away from pure abstraction to and toward explicit social critique. Take Finding Barry (2015), a lobby-wall commission at the Hammer Museum, which saw a map of the United States carved into layers of paint, and inscribing state-by-state AIDS diagnosis rates, or the video Practice (2003), which tackles questions of queerness, Black masculinity, and spectatorship by filming Bradford in a Los Angeles Lakers jersey and an enormous hoop skirt, repeatedly attempting to shoot baskets on a windy outdoor court, the costume both tripping him and turning the performance into a reflection on how Black bodies are read on and off the court.

Bradford’s commitment to social practice extends beyond the studio through Art + Practice, the nonprofit space he co-founded in Leimert Park in 2014 with Allan DiCastro and Eileen Harris Norton, which pairs a contemporary art programme with support services and life-skills training for transition-age foster youth. This parallel work reinforces the ethical stakes of his art, translating questions of representation, access, and care into sustained civic engagement. His social commitments also appear in large-scale public projects such as Mithra (2008), a 70-foot-long, ark-like sculpture built from salvaged posters and plywood for the Prospect.1 New Orleans triennial, conceived as a makeshift refuge in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Collections and Recognition

Bradford has exhibited widely in museums and biennials worldwide, and his work is held in major public collections including:

• The Broad in Los Angeles;
• The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York;
• Tate in the United Kingdom;
• Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); and
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Alongside landmark projects such as Pickett’s Charge (2017) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., his practice has been the focus of major institutional surveys that underline his influence on contemporary abstraction and socially engaged art, including End Papers at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2020), Mark Bradford. Keep Walking at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin (2024–25), travelling to the Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul (2025–26), his first solo exhibition in South Korea.

Tomorrow is Another Day’ at Venice

In 2017, Bradford represented the United States at the 57th Venice Biennale with the solo exhibition Tomorrow Is Another Day in the U.S. Pavilion. The pavilion’s neoclassical architecture is modelled after the estate of former president Thomas Jefferson, who owned enslaved people, and Bradford had audiences enter from the side—an entrance historically used by servants—reframing the building’s symbolic power. Five exhibition rooms showcased works that combined myths, grand historical narratives, and personal experiences; for instance, Spoiled Foot (2017) evokes lesions associated with AIDS, while the narrow spaces left around his works intensified viewers’ awareness of marginalisation and constraint.

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Ocula | 2026