Stuart Collection: Mark Bradford - What Hath God Wrought

The first comprehensive study of the work of one of the most significant abstract painters of his generation. This timely entry in the Contemporary Artists series focuses on Mark Bradford, the Los Angeles-based artist best known for his large-scale abstract paintings that examine the class, race, and gender-based economies that structure urban society. His collages and installations, made of materials scavenged from the streets, have created a unique body of work that still stands as a strong response to the impromptu networks that emerge within a city. In this new title, his life and work are explored as never before.

A stunning mid-career retrospective Mark Bradford is best known for dazzling, large-scale abstract paintings that examine the class-, race-, and gender-based economies that structure urban society in the United States. Gathering carefully chosen found and salvaged materials from the area surrounding his studio in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Bradford engages in an intricate artistic process that involves both creation and destruction. His complex, fractured works address pressing political issues and the media's influence on contemporary society while cataloguing cultural change and the artist's personal responses to societal condition. The first major book on this leading American artist, Mark Bradford features essays by distinguished authors who investigate how Bradford straddles the line between social critique and formal innovation, playing the two against one another to produce works of seduction and analysis.

Mark Bradford's layered, multi-textured paintings have earned him wide critical acclaim. His latest body of work comprises a new group of paintings and a video each of which cycles around the idea of the body in crisis. Bradford witnessed the LA riots (1992) from his studio and has translated the fury, fear, outrage, pandemonium, and lasting wounds into artworks. This volume reproduces in full new paintings in which Bradford carved into the layered surface of the work creating depressions and arteries that structure these otherwise abstract compositions. Bradford's new video references the history of black stand up comedy taking on Eddie Murphy's controversial concert film "Delirious" (1983). In the video Bradford takes on Murphy's searing comments on sexuality, reinterpreting this important cultural moment while considering the modalities of gender and its performance. Accompanying texts include Bradford's trenchant performance script and a scholarly text by Butler explores Bradford's critique of pervasive cultural racism and homophobia in society as a whole.