Mark Bradford Examines Vulnerability and Resilience across New Abstractions

Tales of personal and historical migration lie at the root of conceptual artist Mark Bradford’s work. Across video, abstract painting, and installation, Bradford collages navigational timetables, maps, and billboard papers, turning his personal narrative into large-scale abstract “paintings” made out of paper, rope, paste, and found materials. These navigational ephemera (like maps and timetables) function as a metaphor for how Bradford has had to identify and navigate non-safe spaces in search of kinship for Black queer people in his youth. Bradford buries the objects (and their meaning) under layers so that audiences are left only with a visual representation of Bradford’s need to flee.

“Maybe it’s because I’m a Scorpio, but I like to hide things,” he said at the opening of “You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice,” the first solo exhibition by Bradford in New York since 2015, on view through July 28th. The exhibition occupies the entirety of Hauser & Wirth’s five-story Chelsea location and is composed of works that began during the national stay-at-home order during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because of the supply restrictions caused by the pandemic, Bradford made the works from items on hand, largely on paper pasted together. “Maybe it was because I was locked down and thinking about landscape and not going into [it], I was creating my own landscape,” Bradford told audiences during the press preview.

In the show, Bradford creates a fantastical sense of escapism that is whimsical, but grounded in real-life portrayals of physical and metaphysical flight of Black people. For example, in Johnny the Jaguar and Two-Faced (both 2023), Bradford cites the homestead of Blackdom, New Mexico, that placed ads in the early 20th century soliciting Black individuals to join their community (another work in that series is currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum), amid large-scale works on paper that evoke colorful, classical European tapestries. “I have to give myself permission to play,” Bradford said.

Bradford’s practice mirrors his own history of flight and wandering. Having watched friends and members of his community die from complications of HIV/AIDS, Bradford felt like there wasn’t a future to plan for and spent most of his early adulthood migrating across Europe. In his thirties, Bradford returned to Los Angeles to pursue a formal arts practice, receiving his BFA and MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, in 1995 and 1997, respectively. Although largely abstract, Bradford’s work builds upon his personal history by using moments from popular culture and history as beacons of meaning in his life.

In a video on view in the exhibition, titled Death Drop, 1973 (1973), we see the artist as a boy of 12 recreating a scene from the Blaxploitation film Cleopatra Jones (1973). Bradford mimes being gunned down in the clip, but the looped video (originally shot on Super 8mm film) features the artist standing back up, creating his own metaphor for resilience. “When I started to go through puberty, the body that I was born into started to grow to be six-foot-five at 12. I was just this shy little weird kid, which I was completely fine with, but now you have all these debates around your body and disappointment,” he said. “And I’m just 12 years old trying to have a good time, but having to navigate people’s perceptions of me, it’s just constant object-subject,” he said, referring to the way that people began to target him for his queerness. “The falling is one side of it, but the fact that he wiggled back up is the journey.”

The work recalls another video, Niagra (2005), which the artist showed as part of his presentation at the U.S. pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. The video references Marilyn Monroe’s infamous swish walk in the neo-noir color film Niagara (1953). In Bradford’s film, a young, queer Black man walks from the corner store to his home doing a similar hip sway. “He was just being him and I was just being me,” Bradford said of the comparison, further emphasizing how his works become containers for a type of Black queerness to emerge unrestrained and unoppressed.

“I wanted to go a little more queer with this show,” Bradford told Artsy, in reference to the more explicit references to queer culture featured throughout the show. “Gayness always felt more binary to me as in opposition to heterosexuality, but queerness opens things up.” Bradford’s evocation of queer culture is most evident in his recent companion piece to Death Drop, 1973, which has a corresponding title: Death Drop, 2023 (2023). Separated by 50 years, the foam sculpture is made from 3D imaging of Mark Bradford’s body, increased in size by roughly 30 percent, falling to the floor in a dance move known as a “dip,” colloquially referred to as a “death drop” in ballroom culture.

In the piece, Bradford wears a puffer jacket to symbolize that although the figure is doing a death drop, he is not performing it inside the safety of a queer club, but is vulnerable and exposed in the outside world. Bradford also expressed his dislike of the colloquial term “death drop” to describe the “dip” move. He wanted the piece to play on the perceived violence of the phrase for those outside of ballroom culture, while also recognizing how those bodies in ballroom are more vulnerable outside of that space.