This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series. It’s contrasting dark and vibrant tones presage his later series of works, exhibited at L. A.’s Hammer Museum as Scorched Earth. These larger works share a map-like quality, looking like aerial views of some scarred urban landscape. Black and red lines sear across the compositions, made through Bradford’s unique layering and burning techniques. The 2012 print—a small shard, perhaps, from one of these larger views of the land—shares this approach. Greyed fragments crisp along the edges into rock-like formations, engulfed in the umber and orange colors of fire.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, artist Mark Bradford draws material, inspiration, and methods from the city streets that surround him. His large-scaled collage paintings for which he is known are often built up through layers of repurposed street advertisements, hair papers, flyers, and scraps. Cementing these fragments together with paint and overlaying recycled street art stencils, Bradford evokes rich, colorful works that are alive with texture, and teeming with shards of the material world. In his earliest works, Bradford relied heavily on hair papers (used during the process of permanently curling hair), pilfered from his mother’s beauty salon in L.A. Singing the edges, Bradford created unsteady grids and jumbled geometries shot through with color.
Hernan Bas’s recent works, particularly his series “The Conceptualists,” showcase his continued exploration into the realms of queerness, desire, the occult, and the absurd...
A Splinter (Study for Painting) is a large graphite work on paper by Hernan Bas that was intended as a study for a later painting...
This series of small drawings is executed with varying materials—pen, ink, colored pencil, charcoal, and masking tape—on architect’s tracing paper...
Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco...
Casa de la cabeza (2011) is a drawing of the words of the title, which translate literally into English as “house of the head.” Ortiz uses this humorous phrase to engage the idea of living in your head....
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage...
In Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012), Tossin documents the remains of Henry Ford’s rubber enterprise Fordlândia, built in 1928 in the Brazilian Amazon to export cultivated rubber for the booming automobile industry...
Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining....
While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves...
MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...
Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
In her masterpiece 8 Possible Beginnings or The Creation of African-America , Walker unravels just that, the story of struggle, oppression, escape and the complexities of power dynamics in the history following slave trade in America...
The sculpture And Shadows Will Follow is an angle piece that articulates a space since its appearance highly changes depending on the point of view...
In No Title (Blue Chapel) Therrien has reduced the image of a chapel to a polygon...
The black-and-white projection, Araf by Didem Pekün, begins, as a lithe man stands high up in the middle of the grand, rebuilt 16th-century Ottoman bridge in Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina...
Phinthong made four photographs depicting fragments of meteorites of which the faces have been polished to reflect the sky...