Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth, June 20 until September 27, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Scorched Earth, 2015.
About:
Comprising approximately 12 new paintings—including a major wall painting in the lobby gallery—and a multimedia installation, this new body of work by Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bradford refers to formative moments in his life and ruminations on the body in crisis. As an artist who has long been interested in strategies of mapping and the psychogeography of the city he calls home, Bradford uses his characteristic painting style to excavate the terrain—emotional, political, and actual—that he inhabits. Examining the moment and afterlife of the 1992 uprisings in Los Angeles, which he experienced from his studio in Leimert Park, Bradford has translated the outrage and lasting wounds of the riots into these new paintings.
Scorched Earth, 2015.
The second component of this exhibition is a multimedia installation, reimagining stand-up comedian Eddie Murphy’s searing commentary on sexuality in his controversial 1983 concert film, Delirious. Bradford’s early identification as an artist emerging in the mid-1980s was informed by queer and feminist politics during the developing AIDS crisis. With this work, he explodes the deep cultural fears and misrepresentations that misconceive of black identity and gender as one-dimensional, providing a trenchant critique of pervasive cultural racism and homophobia in society as a whole.
Mark Bradford was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, where he continues to live and work. In 2010, You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You), a large–scale survey of Bradford’s work, was presented at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus. This retrospective traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Bradford has exhibited widely and has participated in many important group shows including, notably, the Gwanju Biennale (2012), the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011), the Seoul Biennial (2010), the Carnegie International (2008), the Sao Paulo Biennial (2006), and the Whitney Biennial (2006). Solo museum exhibitions include the Aspen Art Museum (2011); Maps and Manifests at the Cincinnati Museum of Art (2008); and Neither New Nor Correct at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007). He was elected to the National Academy in 2013 and was awarded the Mac Arthur Foundation Fellowship in 2009. In 2015, Bradford received the National Medal of the Arts. In 2014, Bradford opened a solo exhibition, Sea Monsters, at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. Bell Tower, a large–scale multimedia installation commissioned by the City of Los Angeles for the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX, debuted in November 2014.
The Tears of a Tree, 2014.
Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth is organized by the Hammer Museum and curated by Connie Butler, chief curator, with Jamillah James, assistant curator.
