WALTHAM, MASS.- The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University presents Mark Bradford: Sea Monsters, an exhibition of major new paintings and sculptures by MacArthur-award winning artist Mark Bradford, featuring a monumental text-based mural created in direct relation to the Rose’s glass-fronted Lois Foster Wing. On view September 11 through December 21, the exhibition is free and open to the general public.
This just-completed body of work draws upon the example of Medieval and Renaissance maps: specifically, the tendency of cartographic illustrators to use fantastical creatures to mark uncharted waters, tempting explorers to reach further into the unknown. Bradford’s abstractions do not strive for cartographic precision, but rather evoke the socioeconomic conditions of communities under siege and in a near constant state of emergency and reinvention.
The seascape of paintings, inflated and failed buoys, and the monumentally scaled mural that together comprise Sea Monsters were all executed in the last six months. All are made of worldly matter, yet exert an otherworldly effect, pointing at once to that which we know and everything about our world that remains a mystery. By moving back and forth between mapping social conditions in flux and refining his formal approach to painting, Bradford has derived a new language of abstraction that is as much a hermetic studio discipline as it is of and about the world we share, a language best described as social abstraction.
Bradford is best known for his large-scale abstract paintings that examine the class-, race-, and gender-based economies that structure urban society in the United States. Though his richly layered canvases represent a connection to the social world through materials, Bradford uses fragments of found posters, billboards, newsprint and custom printed paper to simultaneously engage with and advance the formal traditions of abstract painting.
As Rose Director Christopher Bedford, curator of the exhibition, explains, “Bradford allows a deep embeddedness in the daily political realities of the present to suggest and ignite his formal investigations. He constructs single images from vast constellations of fragments, quite literally making an image of and about history where otherwise one might not exist. The meaning in his work accrues through the construction of an image-based sentence in space, a kind of intuitive metonymy binding fragments of imagery and text to produce a total composition. The stories he tells and the materials and methods he employs are resoundingly fresh and patently autographic, extending the promise of countless new histories.”
The exhibition is organized by the Rose Art Museum and will travel to the GEM Museum of Contemporary Art in The Hague, Netherlands, in spring of 2015.
Mark Bradford was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, where he lives and works. He received a BFA (1995) and MFA (1997) from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. His work has been widely exhibited and has been included in group shows at LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014), Whitney Museum of American Art (2013), the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011), Seoul Biennial (2010), the Carnegie International (2008), São Paulo Biennial (2006), and Whitney Biennial (2006).
Solo exhibitions include Aspen Art Museum (2011), Maps and Manifests at Cincinnati Museum of Art (2008) and Neither New Nor Correct at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007). In 2009, Mark Bradford was the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Award. In 2010, You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You), a large-scale survey of his work, was organized by Christopher Bedford and presented at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, before traveling to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
In early 2015, Bradford will open a not-for-profit center in LA to engage local at-risk youth in the arts. Occupying almost an entire city block, the facility will be comprised of an exhibition space, a book lounge, artist-in-residence space, coffee shop, classrooms and a computer lab.
