Mark Bradford

Sikkema Jenkins Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although fails to convey the fluorescent tones of the yellow and pink paper squares. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition.
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"I like to walk through the city and find details and then abstract them and make them my own. I’m not speaking for a community or trying to make a sociopolitical point. At the end it’s my mapping. My subjectivity" 

The artist cited in: Mark Bradford: "Market >Place", Art21, 2007.

Strikingly coloured, and composed on a heroic scale, Mark Bradford’s Double Stretch is an extraordinary feat of artistic endeavour, fusing complex socio-cultural ideas with a detailed and labour-intensive collage process.  This uniquely double-sided work is a consummate example of the artist’s intriguing early practice which has since won him critical acclaim with a string of prestigious prizes including The Bucksbaum Award from the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The present work exhibits a delicate material assemblage of found paper that evokes associations with the raw physicality of Robert Rauschenberg’s early combines. While Bradford acknowledges his admiration for his predecessor the artist has said he found Rauschenberg’s work, "too heavy for me. I was always trying to be thin" (Mark Bradford in conversation with Christopher Bedford in: Exhibition Catalogue, Ohio, Wexner Centre for the Arts, Mark Bradford, 2010, p. 60). Instead, Bradford’s process takes a more literal approach to the melding of art and life by cutting, sanding and mangling the paper he finds in his immediate area to evince an enigmatically sculptural form from this two-dimensional material. The frenetically worked paper is then painstakingly pasted onto a mesh which acts as both a grid-like structure and molded physical support, creating a repetitive cycle of layers that ebb and flow over a topographic landscape of puzzling complexity. The image revealed by Bradford’s  dynamic process is both organic and geometric, encapsulating the fluid energy of Jackson Pollock’s theatrical creations,  yet embedded with the rigorous geometry of urban street plans which gives the work its quasi-figurative subject.

The artist’s unique aesthetic has a deep-rooted connection to his hometown of Leimert Park, Los Angeles, where he grew up helping his mother in her hair salon. Bradford credits his experiences here with instilling in him a deep appreciation for the art of hand-made process and the act of creation which so defines his oeuvre. Each of the artist’s intricate collages is composed of found materials specific to his hometown: scraps of billboard posters and hairdressers permanent wave end-papers appear in his compositions amongst a mélange of urban ephemera gathered from the streets outside his studio. These found shapes dominate the present work, particularly the rectangular forms of the hairdresser’s papers, which are rhythmically pasted over the entire mesh surface. By using these recognizable objects Bradford moves his creation away from the fraught dialogue of pure abstract painting and locates it in urban life and his own personal experience. The honesty invoked by using materials of the real world rather than those of the ‘art world’ is also carried in very title of the work:  Double Stretch not only references the explicit duality of this two-sided piece, but also a form of hair comb from the tools of Bradford’s trade in the hair salon, and as such is intrinsically loaded with the complex cultural semiotics of afro hair. The sherbet-bright colours of Double Stretch further locate the piece in an urban context, forming a subtle commentary on dominance of advertising and media in contemporary society.

By making the detritus of the urban area the very building blocks of his creations, Bradford’s works become a tableau of the societal and economic patterns of the neighbourhood of Leimert Park.  It is in this social context that Bradford describes his own role in the community as that of a ‘modern-day flaneur,’ saying, "I like to walk through the city and find details and then abstract them and make them my own. I’m not speaking for a community or trying to make a sociopolitical point. At the end it’s my mapping. My subjectivity" (Mark Bradford quoted in, Mark Bradford: "Market >Place", Art21, 2007).