Blood On The Canvas: Mark Bradford Quarantined

I am writing about an exhibition that I have not seen in person – and that can’t be seen in person, “Mark Bradford: Quarantine Paintings.” The exhibition consists of three large abstract works by Mark Bradford that are of a piece yet remain separate, disconnected from the narrative of his most recent works, not only in terms of size, materials, content, texture, and surface appearance but because Bradford has placed the paintings themselves in quarantine at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles.

Mark Bradford is an LA-based artist, born in LA, whose mother ran a beauty salon in Leimert Park where Bradford worked for many years. After sporadically attending Los Angeles City College over many years, Bradford received his BA and MFA from CalArts, graduating in 1997 when he was already in his late 30s.

His rise since then has been nothing short of meteoric, with his distinctive large-scale canvases often incorporating found materials such as various types of paper, rope, and ribbons of colored paper that are built up in layers and excavated using industrial tools like a sand-blaster, and suggesting networks whose significance can represent personal and social issues.

Bradford’s Quarantine Paintings came online in early September and can only be viewed on the web at Hauser & Wirth’s website.

The landing page of the exhibition’s first image is of one Bradford’s paintings hanging on the painted brick wall of an empty industrial space in which the paint on some of the columns is flaking off. You actually see one and half paintings (a second one is only partially glimpsed).

In the foreground of the image is a metal chain closing off the space with the sign “closed until further notice.” Which, in its plain-spoken truth, sets the stage for Bradford’s new work.

The website tells us that “Bradford’s ‘Quarantine Paintings’ finds the artist exploring the nature of creativity in isolation and the role of art in a time of intense societal indetermination.”

The paintings are simply named Q1, Q2, Q3,

Bradford’s paintings are abstract; but they are the opposite of non-referential. Bradford has explained that he brings everything in himself, in his own story, in the stories of the marginalized communities he knows to his paintings and pushes them to the center.

A couple of things about what these paintings are not – “Gone from these paintings are the hotspots and lesions that have become a familiar feature in Bradford’s work in recent years,” says the press release. “Gone are the wads of paper rising from the surface of the canvas and marking discrete locations, the formal analogs to specific real-world acts of violence, disruption, and decay.”

The size of these paintings (6’ X 8’) is smaller than the work Bradford has created recently. He has not worked in this size in some 10 years, he recently told Madeleine Brand of KCRW’s Press play in an interview. He also revealed that the paintings match his actual size (height and arm span). They are the size that he can handle by himself, which is what the pandemic has wrought. Accordingly, the paintings should also carry the disclaimer that “no assistants were used in the making of this artwork.”

Due to the quarantine, Bradford executed every aspect of the paintings – the canvas on its stretchers, making the lines, and attaching the strings on the painting, working on the surfaces. When completed, he took a U-Haul and drove the paintings to Hauser & Wirth and installed them on the walls of an unused part of the building complex.

Bradford has described these paintings as a “an artistic time capsule of what I was feeling when this moment was going on.”

As such, each painting represents a phase of the pandemic and also a block of time. So painting Q1 is both Bradford’s first painting of the Quarantine as well as a painting of Q1, the first quarter of the pandemic.

As to the paintings:

Q1. This painting is primarily red (there are reds, orange and purple in the mix but overall it reads red). Aquamarine appears in the upper left corners and at various spots almost an as if it was an undercoat. It almost looks like the red has invaded and taken over the aqua.

Q1 reads like a visual map of the spread of Covid, of Covid taking over our planet and our lives.

There is a certain intensity to this painting. A certain violence in the attack.

As if there is blood on the canvas, literally. And because Bradford has lived through a pandemic before, this painting also references the AIDS epidemic which Bradford has spoken of with regard to his work.

The painting also has white lines coursing throughout the painting which can be seen as the arteries or the present lines of communications being overwhelmed by Covid. The grid has been overtaken, Bradford is telling us. In Q1, Bradford told PressPlay’s Brand that it is as if, “The grids are melting.”

Bradford explained further: “I put all the brights and all the bright colors, and then I cover them up with all this dark paper. And then I sand through to retrieve it. ‘Cause I have to work for it. It really is excavation. It's all excavation, all making a problem that I have to solve a problem solved or something that I have to fix. It's gotten out of control and I have to fix it. I'm a fixer. I like to fix things, but I think I create problems. And then I like to fix them.”

But in Q1, the only fix is in what Bradford can control in the painting, in his life – not in the world, If the question is what to do during the pandemic and quarantine, the answer for Bradford is to work, to create work that speaks to the now.

Q2. In this painting, the striations, the grids or arteries or the roads in this map, are much more visible. There is more green visible, almost a heart of green in the paintings center. However the edges are more black and the red is peeking through in spots.

One can argue that in this painting, the second in the series, the second quarter of this year of pandemic, Bradford sees hope that the plague may be receding. The green areas, our environment, our planet, is reasserting itself. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the green center is a smaller area – there are still spots of red, even in the center, and there is blackness all around. So, although nature may be flourishing, only a central few are surviving. Covid had not been completely vanquished and there is death all around. This is the truth of the plague year.

The particular set up for online viewing of the paintings allows the viewer to pass a viewing bubble over the painting which magnifies a small area. I will say that this close observation on the one hand is frustrating because it does not really give a sense of the texture of the painting or even its composition – everything is flat and there’s no clarity as to what is paint or paper – and whether the white striations are paint or the removal or absence of paint or tears or slashes.

On the other hand, these close up views makes one very much feel like one is looking through a microscope, and that what one is seeing is a microbe or cell organism. I would like to believe that this is intentional. That Bradford is painting the body politic in these works, as well as his personal experience of the pandemic, almost at a cellular level.

Q3. Finally, in the third painting, the red is back, and it is angrier, more violent even. It looks almost like a bird (a phoenix perhaps?) who is rising and spreading its wings. To me, this represents Covid’s return in the third quarter of the pandemic, stronger and wider-spread than before. Now the green is obscured, and black courses through underneath. The white grids resemble a structure in the midst of collapse – like a highway bridge after an earthquake. It is denser work with more going on – more slashes, more colors – faster, more jumbled than the prior paintings. This is where we are at – right now. It is not a pretty picture but it speaks of resilience and surviving a struggle.

Bradford’s personal credo is to make work that speaks not just of the human condition but of the condition of all that is him and his. In this pandemic, he can’t partake of the outside world and all the outside people that he normally does. He has no control of other people, and of the pandemic itself. So, he does his work. He tells us the condition as he sees and experiences it. But that experience is one we, the viewing public, remain quarantined from.

So, until some future date, Bradford’s Quarantine paintings remained put away, hanging in isolation, unseen in person, available only as most of us are these days, online.

Like Bradford’s Quarantine Paintings, our relation to each other and to art itself remains “closed until further notice.”