Beschreibung:

Property From A Distinguished Private Collection Mark Bradford Waiting on Forever 2011 mixed media collage on canvas 102.6 x 122.3 cm (40 3/8 x 48 1/8 in.) Signed, titled and dated 'Waiting on Forever 2011 Mark Bradford' on the reverse.
Provenance Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York Catalogue Essay Mark Bradford’s work is defined by a twin process. As he puts it, ‘my practice is décollage and collage at the same time. Décollage: I take it away; collage: I immediately add it right back.’ (Mark Bradford ‘Mark Bradford: Politics, Process, and Postmodernism,' Art21). He starts with pieces of found media, among them posters, fliers and hairstylists’ endpapers, and from them creates densely layered pieces: accretions of text and image. In this process, remnants of experience are piled atop each other, alternately rearranged and subsumed. Discussing his method, Bradford relates ‘I may pull raw material from a very specific place, culturally from a particular place, but then I abstract it. I’m only really interested in abstraction; but social abstraction, not just 1950s abstraction.’ (Mark Bradford in conversation with Susan May, Through Darkest America by Truck and Tank, exh.cat., London: White Cube, 2013, p.83). Often deriving this raw material from the streets of Los Angeles’ Leimert Park, the extent to which it remains decipherable varies between pieces. In the present lot, constituent parts are largely legible. The words ‘SELL’, ‘HAIR’ and the telephonic fragment ‘1-887’ suggest that the source is promotional material for the sale of hair - a practice which Bradford would have encountered working in his mother’s salon. Yet in the repeated and blurrily overlaid iterations of these characters, the original material dissipates. It is replaced by a more nebulous presence: an abstracted atmosphere, emerging yet distinct from the raw material. Bradford is interested in echoes, in ghosts, and in waning: as he recounts, ‘I think all of my work comes out of the body and the disappearances, traces and hints of the body, through the traces of the materials that were there.’ (Mark Bradford in conversation with Susan May, Through Darkest America by Truck and Tank, exh. cat., London: White Cube, 2013, p.84). There are many such traces in the lot at hand, not least the in the story of the material itself; the text is a product of human industry which has been written, printed and then displayed. But there is another layer of resonance too. The abstracted reference to the beauty industry rallies a history of experience; hair is a remnant of the body, cut off or re-attached in the act of grooming. Humanity reverberates about the piece, felt most acutely by its departure. If Bradford’s work is an abstracted vision of the society from which it emerges, it is also an abstraction of the severances and dissonances inherent to that society. In the present lot, the text not only overlaps, but is cut across by a series of wound-like slashes. Redolent of disturbance and distress, the idea of rupture is central to the artist’s practice: ‘I rupture ... Because that’s what history does ... So I always try to have these interruptions in my work.’ (Mark Bradford in conversation with Abraham Ritchie, Artslant Worldwide, August 2011). In more recent years this sensibility has continued to find expression. Discussing the scarred map-like canvases of his 2013 show Through Darkest America by Truck and Tank, he reflects on physical disruption in the urban environment; ‘what is interesting to me about freeways is that they always cut through poor neighbourhoods.’ (Mark Bradford in conversation with Susan May, Through Darkest America by Truck and Tank, exh. cat., London: White Cube, 2013, p.75). Here, as in the present lot, his focus is on dialogue between space and human experience; between environment and existence. With an eye to the societal, Bradford’s abstraction is related to that of the Danish Situationist Asger Jorn As the artist himself remarks, ‘going back to Jorn, he really had a social politic, it wasn’t really that life is separate from the society in which you live.’ (Mark Bradford in conversation with Susan May, Through Darkest America by Truck and Tank, exh. cat., London: White Cube