The Exploding View

Choosing a few pieces to represent Mark Bradford’s oeuvre is not easy. He works in a wide range of forms, including photography, video, sculpture and site-specific installations, but ultimately I focused on his extraordinary collages. They bristle with energy, evoking the cacophonous, edgy urban environment that is contemporary L.A. They dazzle the eye with flickering color set in undulating, expansive fields, kaleidoscopic reminders of how quickly the terrain of the city shifts. In mixing materials from the world in which the artist lives--such as self-posted cardboard signs and beauty salon end papers--with the materials of the fine arts, they remind me of the combines of Robert Rauschenberg, though they were made 3,000 miles and 50 years from Rauschenberg’s New York. The collages shown here follow Bradford’s trajectory over the past five years, illuminating the shift to increased complexity and magisterial scale. But they all evidence the essence of an artist who fuses elegance and beauty with urban grit.