Fullerton Hall in the Art Institute of Chicago
Fabricating his signature mixed-media collages with ephemera such as segments of billboards, flyers, and graffitied stencils, American artist Mark Bradford’s works marry his interests in modernist abstraction with the urban community from which he culls his materials. These ambitious, visually arresting works are striking for their simultaneous incorporation of physical remnants of a site and semi-figurative depiction of a scene or topography. In Kryptonite (2006), for example, Bradford amasses a dense grid of collaged materials that seems to delineate the aerial view of a city while visually recalling iconic modernist artwork such as Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43). Bradford also creates public art, installations, and video, often exploring the relationship between high art and popular culture and between materiality, surface, and image. Bradford is a recipient of the Whitney Museum's Bucksbaum Award and was a 2009 MacArthur Fellow.
