A Siren Beside a Ship

Mark BradfordWW-2014-049019

2014·Mixed media on canvas·259.1 × 365.7 cm (102 × 144 in.)

Mark Bradford’s monumental abstract paintings comprise countless small fragments — often materials scavenged from storefronts, telephone poles, and billboards in the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles, where he grew up. The artist has explained, “I love the papered ‘mosaics’ I see in the community advertising the latest latest. . . . [When] the billboards are nice and thick and are about to fall off . . . I pull down what I need to create my collages. . . . Like those tagged up, repainted, tagged up, sanded, and repainted walls you pass everyday on the street, my process is both reductive and additive.” Bradford is also known for redeploying hair dye and wave endpapers from his mother’s salon, where he worked on and off for many years, and more recently for using home-repair caulking to amplify ridges and depths. It is usually impossible to recognize such individual materials on his surfaces; the power of Bradford’s work is the power of cumulative materiality, at once enigmatic and evocative. The sweeping composition of A Siren beside a Ship is built up from a mix of carbon paper, caulking, and acrylic gel medium that Bradford relentlessly layered, sanded, and layered again to create a dense, suggestive texture. The surface’s striations recall rippling water and seascape paintings, which the artist has said summon for him the dark histories of conquistadors, colonization, and the transatlantic slave trade. Given this work’s title, the wavelike markings also reference the dangerously enchanting voices of the Sirens of Greek mythology, as well as the sound of a modern-day alarm, combining a sense of allure with one of urgent warning.

Catalogue

Year: 2014
Medium: Mixed media on canvas
Dimensions: 259.1 × 365.7 cm (102 × 144 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Mark Bradford

Artist

Mark Bradford

Mixed Media

The multimedia artist Mark Bradford was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, California, and was raised predominantly in the area known as South Central, where his mother worked as a hairdresser. Even after his family relocated to Santa Monica when he was 11, he continued to spend a great deal of time in the neighborhood, as it was where his mother’s business was located. Bradford’s proclivity for art manifested at a young age, and some of his earliest experiments with art – which in many ways foreshadowed his later, mature work – utilized materials he found around his mother’s place of work, hairdressing materials such as bobby pins, hair dye and perm endpapers. Despite this, it was not until Bradford was in his early 30s that he undertook formal study at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, where he eventually received his BFA in 1995 and his MFA in 1997.

Los Angeles, CA, USA

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