Mark Bradford October 21, 2012

Mark Bradford's densely layered, large-scale paper collage and decollage works are canny abstract accumulations of urban rejecta created from informal merchant advertising materials found around his Los Angeles community. Taking posters from chain link fences hastily erected after the Los Angeles riots, layering them with paint, twine, and glue, and then working their surfaces with subtractive processes like sanding, Bradford becomes both builder and archaeologist, filtering the visual manifestations of ad hoc groups like migrant communities through his own subjectivity. His public-domain practice reinvigorates traditions of abstraction and appropriation with a thoughtful response to the social and visual layering of the urban environment.