Mark Bradford makes sculptures, installations, videos, prints, and vast paintings that explore the aesthetics and the economics of informal urban transactions. His multilayered and vibrant paintings are built up using commonplace materials such as translucent paper, string, magazine pages, tape, and colored stationery and often incorporate remnants of "street spam" advertisements for workers "living under the radar of formal business." This collage practice might recall the torn-poster works of French affichiste artists such as Raymond Hains and Jacques de la Villeglé working in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet in the 'hood that is Bradford's paintings, the strata of paper and stains are mimicked rather than appropriated, and in works such as Method Man (2004), it accumulates a radically different expression of urban pop culture that resonates with the scarified sidewalk culture of South Los Angeles. "Like those tagged up, repainted, tagged up, sanded, and repainted walls you pass everyday on the street, my process is both reductive and additive."

MA

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Temporary, 2005. Mixed-media collage and string on paper, 130 x 196 in. (330.2 x 497.8 cm). Collection of James Patterson; courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

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