Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford
Born	1961 Los Angeles
Alma mater	California Institute of the Arts and Edinburgh Primary School
Known for	abstract painting, performance art

Mark Bradford (born 1961 Los Angeles, California) is an American artist living and working in Los Angeles.

Bradford was born and raised in South Los Angeles. His mother Janice Banks owned a beauty salon in Leimert Park. Bradford and his family moved to a then largely white neighborhood in Santa Monica when he was 11, but his mother still maintained her business in the old neighborhood, where Bradford worked some time. When Bradford graduated high school, he obtained his hairdresser's license and went to work at his mother's salon.

Bradford began his studies at the California Institute of the Arts in 1991 at the age of 30. Here, he earned a BFA in 1995 and an MFA in 1997.

Bradford is known for grid-like abstract paintings combining collage with paint. His collage Orbit (2007), contains a magazine image of a basketball placed at the heart of a dense lattice of LA streets. Created by the cumulative and subtractive processes of collage and décollage, layered with paint, Orbit appears an like aerial view of a contorting, mutating, and decaying city whose tiny, intricate street grids can no longer maintain its structural integrity. Bradford’s improvisational command of these large areas suggests the formidable energy of mass consumption and, perhaps more importantly, its counterpart, the mass generation of detritus.

Bradford's A Truly Rich Man is One Whose Children Run into His Arms Even When His Hands Are Empty (2008), nearly 9 feet wide and 9 feet tall, according to Maxwell Heller in The Brooklyn Rail, "calls to mind the charred and shattered windshields of cars burned in riots—black, webbed with streaks of light, sleek. If studied section by section, it offers traces of the artist’s sensual, tactile process, revealing delicate layers of found material sliced and sanded, lacquered and pasted until transformed."

Bradford’s practice also encompasses video, print and installation. In his installation Mithra (2008), Bradford shipped a 70 x 20 x 25 ft ark constructed from salvaged plywood barricade fencing to New Orleans for Prospect New Orleans, an exhibition of contemporary art commemorating Hurricane Katrina. That same year, he created an installation inspired by Hurricane Katrina on the roof of the Steve Turner Contemporary Gallery, across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The piece—an enormous SOS sign visible only from the air—said simply "HELP US."

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