Mark Bradford found his way to becoming an artist while working in his mother’s beauty shop.
The Los Angeles-born artist used layers of the cheap end papers — thin delicate sheets used to protect hair from burning during perming — instead of paint in the early works that would soon earn him an international reputation, eventually leading to the official United States pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, his most important exhibition to date.
Nearly 40 when Thelma Golden selected him to participate in her landmark 2001 “Freestyle” exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, featuring mostly young Black artists embracing abstraction and challenging dogmas of representation, he has emerged as one of America’s greatest living painters.
Yet, technically speaking, he continues to use paper rather than paint as his primary medium.
In “You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice,” Bradford’s works take over the entirety of Hauser & Wirth’s five-story Chelsea flagship, his first New York solo exhibition since 2015, showing a dozen paintings alongside two works that set the mood, a sculpture and a video piece that find the artist taking stock and assessing his own meteoric rise.
Persons:
Mark Bradford, —, Thelma Golden
Organizations:
Studio Museum, Hauser, Chelsea, New York
Locations:
Los Angeles, United States, Venice, Harlem