They seem to be about something-to map something, even-but it is often unclear exactly what. The best of Bradford’s paintings seem to hover in various stages, from violence to a more elevated state. He finds something he not-so-long-ago lost and subsequently conceals or protects some of that find. He might partially erase a recent concealment then jewel over part of a reveal. As a painter, he inters his own strokes and traces, then exposes some of what he first perhaps hid or obscured. Reaching into Bradford’s biography, Butler asked viewers to see his investigations as existing at the intersection of queer experience and black experience in Los Angeles.īradford tests and re-tests surfaces. urban environment in general, this work by itself was neither clarion nor fully contextualized, yet still flagged South Central Los Angeles as a top layer of ground for the otherwise mostly abstract and hard-to-pin-down investigations included in the exhibition. The bright and blocky text painting in English and Spanish urged: “Rebuild South Central Without Liquor Stores!!” As much a slogan as a signifier for the current U.S. One of Bradford’s signature text paintings seemed like a non-sequitur, but it set a locale. Three haunting, untitled, twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot, black-and-white, unstretched canvases in a low-lit section of a gallery at the Hammer suggested dusky rivers and abrupt stops where Bradford accumulated, stained, and resisted staining by laying on and pulling away wet paper. They looked inward and back, and they were surprisingly aqueous. Exquisitely detailed, the paintings evoked pain and violence. Scorched Earth was tough and admirably far-reaching.

Mark Bradford’s solo exhibition, Scorched Earth, curated by Connie Butler at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, included twelve paintings, a mural, and a sound installation.

Performance Art/Performance Studies/Public Practice.

Museum Practice/Museum Studies/Curatorial Studies/Arts Administration.

Drawings/Prints/Work on Paper/Artistc Practice.

Digital Media/New Media/Web-Based Media.

Architectural History/Urbanism/Historic Preservation.

Subject, Genre, Media, Artistic Practice.

Scorched earth detailed map