This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series.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.
Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco...
Barbara Kasten’s Studio Construct 51 depicts an abstract still life: a greyscale photograph of clear translucent panes assembled into geometric forms, the hard lines of their edges converging and bisecting at various points...
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....
Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape...
Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
Natasha Wheat’s Kerosene Triptych (2011) is composed of three images, one each from the digital files of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Field Museum tropical research archive...
In this photographic series, Yto Barrada was interested in the logos of the buses that travel between North Africa and Europe...
Telescopic Pole is an adjustable telescopic pole that extends vertically from floor to ceiling and is held up by its own internal pressure...
Shot in the streets of Tokyo, Collapse , is a meditation on the passing of time and on the complicated way in which we are smashed between the past and the future...
Itch explores the relationship between technology and daily human experience with a motorized arm that extends from within the gallery’s wall, moving up and down while holding a projector that shows a desperately scratching pair of hands....