The acclaimed painter tells fascinating stories about his art, but its colors, textures and materials are what hook you
“Fire Fire” (2021), by Mark Bradford. Mixed media on canvas. (Sarah Muehlbauer/Hauser & Wirth)
NEW YORK — What makes Mark Bradford one of America’s most exciting artists is not his charitable work, or his biography, his racial or sexual identity, or even, to be completely frank, his work’s content — the stories that are attached to it, the stuff that he and others like to say it is about. Those things do thicken our interest, our sense of his art’s possibilities, its meanings, and I don’t mean to underplay them.
But Bradford, 61, is an abstract artist. That there is nothing “pure” about his abstraction — that it is a notably capacious variety of the genre, incorporating snippets of text and occasional figurative imagery — doesn’t alter the fact that the look of his work, its colors, shapes, scale and textures, is what undergirds its success.
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