Mark Bradford Essay

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Mark Bradford is an artist who has managed to continuously stretch and twist contemporary art in an extraordinary demonstration of flexibility that includes just about any element of art. He has mastered how to manipulate historicism to work for him by making a place of change that can be engaged by his audience. In particular, Bradford has managed to create some of the most outstanding sculptural displays that transcend time and space for his eager audience. He is best known for his abstract paintings that explore class, race, and gender-oriented economies that make up the American urban society. His multi-layered and collaged canvases capture the link of the social world through the represented materials. It is common to find his work mostly …show more content…

He has come to be known for his monumental, iconic abstract collage artworks that represent layered forms and lines made using material such as carbon paper. It is his desire to explore how political and socioeconomic forces interact to shape the complex physical and cultural environments of urban societies. His voice carries a lot of weight in contemporary art for he has carved a path of powerfully advocating for social change. Apart from his active role in advocating for social change through art, Bradford has also managed to offer poignant perspectives on the psychology of human interaction. His practice pushes boundaries of abstract painting to the limits and this is what has attracted numerous accolades from the field of art. It is not wrong to state that he has single-handedly created Social Abstraction. This is a form of painting that is conducted on paper with the aim of engaging the formal history of abstraction. It is also a type of painting that forces the discourse of non-objective painting to contain the social conditions of the societies we are living in. In all fairness, Bradford is expanding abstract painting by progressively integrating social practice into his artwork, which is a bit

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