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Mark Bradford in "Paradox"
“My practice is both collage and décollage at the same time,” says Mark Bradford. “Décollage you take it away, and then collage, I immediately add it right back.” Using a combination of signage from the city streets, including business advertisements and merchant posters, twine, and glue, Bradford produces wall-sized paintings and installations that are a reflection of “the conditions that are going on at that particular moment at that particular location,” he says.
In one installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Bradford uses video to juxtapose two events—a celebratory Martin Luther King Day parade in Los Angeles, and a busy Muslim marketplace in Cairo.
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Mark Bradford transforms materials scavenged from the street into wall-size collages and installations that respond to the impromptu networks—underground economies, migrant communities, or popular appropriation of abandoned public space—that emerge within a city. Drawing from the diverse cultural and geographic makeup of his southern Californian community, Bradford’s work is as informed by his personal background as a third-generation merchant there as it is by the tradition of abstract painting developed worldwide in the twentieth century. Bradford’s videos and map-like, multilayered paper collages refer not only to the organization of streets and buildings in downtown Los Angeles, but also to images of crowds, ranging from civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s to contemporary protests concerning immigration issues.
“My practice is both collage and décollage at the same time. Décollage you take it away, and then collage, I immediately add it right back.”
Mark Bradford
Mark Bradford
Mark Bradford
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How can the processes of drawing and painting, like sculpture, be both additive and subtractive?
Pushing Painting
Josiah McElheny