Mark Bradford found his way to becoming an artist while working in his mother’s beauty salon. The Los Angeles-born artist used layers of the inexpensive liner paper — thin delicate sheets used to protect hair from burning during perming — instead of paint in the early works that would soon earn him an international reputation, eventually would lead to the official pavilion of the United States. at the 2017 Venice Biennale, his most important exhibition to date.
Nearly 40 when Thelma Golden selected him to participate in her groundbreaking 2001 “Freestyle” exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, featuring mostly young black artists embracing abstraction and challenging dogmas of representation, he emerged as one of America’s greatest living painters. Still, he technically continues to use paper rather than paint as his primary medium.
In “You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice,” Bradford’s works take over from Hauser & Wirth’s five-story Chelsea flagship, his first solo exhibition in New York since 2015, featuring a dozen paintings alongside two works that capture the atmosphere. determined. a sculpture and a video piece in which the artist takes stock and assesses his own meteoric rise.
There are no major revelations in the dozens of large-scale paintings created in Bradford’s signature mode that incorporate found paper. There are also no misses. As grand and impressive as ever, he has refined his working method, which succeeds in fusing the history of allover abstraction, from Jackson Pollock to Gerhard Richter, with the paper he often takes from his environment, maintaining the familiar visual effect of weathered and exposed layers of wheat-pasted posters or billboard ads that dot the city streets.
Subdued tones and silvery metallics dominate throughout the gallery building. In “Johnny the Jaguar” (2023), the awkward head of the titular big cat is discernible on an otherwise chaotic expanse that looks like a worn and tangled worn carpet with only a shard of the original composition legible.
The towering collection of “Manifest Destiny” (2023) reads “Johnny Buys Houses” in bold white caps, raising the specter of gentrification. Bradford’s works often feature signs and advertisements ripped from the walls and fences of public spaces. Here, the work’s flashes of color are partly provided by the remnants of a poster announcing a Foo Fighters concert.
Although it occupies the entire building, the exhibition of just 14 works feels intimate, even modest. The 12 paintings (10 from 2023, two from 2021) are joined by the two outlier works, both titled “Death Drop”, both self-portraits of a kind, capturing the artist looking into the mirror and setting a tone of quiet self-reflection that runs throughout the show.
The first, “Death Drop, 1973” (1973), a newer video work the artist dated for his Super-8 film resource, captures a quick moment of a young Bradford standing next to a fence in a playground or park and a dramatic fall for the camera. But repeated digitized editing is slowing dramatically this fall.
Bradford’s tall figure, slender even in a red puffer jacket, bends in a parabolic collapse as his hips move down and down the fence in jeans, only to back up before hitting the ground. He rises until his hands rise above his head in a ballet-like shape, only to fall back down, infinitely in 20-second cycles.
The hypnotic replay draws attention to marginal aspects of the video, such as the menacing shadowy figure of a growling dog on the other side of the fence or the indifferent white man seemingly engrossed in a handball game in the background. A moment remembered in the urban public space, a child making jokes before a camera becomes a choreography.
If the preteen Bradford from the “Death Drop” video never hits the ground, the Bradford from the second “Death Drop 2023” (2023), 50 years later, never seems to leave at a glance. The larger-than-life sculpture, stretching about 10 feet (3 meters) long, depicts a fallen likeness of the artist lying prone and rendered in white, arms dramatically outstretched, his left leg extended and his right bent sharply at the knee beside him.
At first glance, it looks like the aftermath of a violent hood. But the title instead suggests a dramatic moment in the dance, referencing the “death drop” pose popular in gay ballroom culture, when the performer falls to the floor in this position, then stands up and then continue dancing.
A close look at the statue reveals a rhythmic pattern of markings, the figure’s surface worn away, a technique borrowed from his paintings, to reveal hints of color beneath.
Decades in his established style, Bradford continues to glue and layer rubbish and primary documents of life and culture onto his canvases. Here, the artist’s oversized effigy may stretch across the floor, but Mark Bradford still stands: a giant.
Mark Bradford: You don’t have to tell me twice
Through July 28 at Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street, Manhattan; 212-790-3900, hauserwirth.com.