An elegiac assemblage of scorched permanent wave end papers and paint, Burn Baby Burn from 2002 is a superlative example of the insistent materiality and social abstraction that are the hallmarks of Mark Bradford’s work. Drawing upon his experience working in his mother’s hair salon, Burn Baby Burn is one of Bradford’s iconic end-paper paintings, and epitomizes the artist’s interest in the socially and materially specific attributes of found materials—an interest which is the basis of his practice and for which he has been critically and institutionally recognized. A counterpoint to 20^th century associations between the abstract and the sublime, Bradford’s works are singular for the absolute locality and physicality of his work; Burn Baby Burn creates an incandescent viewing experience while also reminding viewers of the material conditions of humanity. Deeply grounded in social experience and invested in vernacular materials and quotidian tools, Bradford explores the logic of post-modernity, labor, and the economies through the real-world detritus and debris collects ed from the city around him. Burn Baby Burn is a visual articulation of the formlessness of economies through a visible, formal, and material surface.

An accretion of diaphanous papers and paint constitutes the surface of the work. Layers and layers of alternately opaque and translucent end papers, charred at the edges, sediment a work that is light despite its encrusted surface. Vibrant, neon orange peeks through the countless layers of periwinkle, beige, and gray end papers scattered across the painting with scorching intensity. Burn Baby Burn evinces a social milieu on the brink of collapse using the debris that physically evidences the social conditions. In the artist’s oeuvre, burning is a continuous metaphor for social catastrophe; alongside Bradford’s Scorched Earth series, Burn Baby Burn stands as a strong index for Bradford’s visual and theoretical interests. Exploring notions of the urban sprawl, hybridity and fragmentation, Bradford’s end papers are scavenged and recombined to form what art critic Christopher Bedford has called the “agitated, fractured surfaces that have become his most recognizable autographic mark.” (Christopher Bedford, “Against Abstraction,” in: Exh. Cat., Columbus, Wexner Center for the Arts, Mark Bradford, 2010, p. 11)

Though Burn Baby Burn is abstracted in the sense that it is a representation without determinate form, Bradford’s subjects and ideas about people, places, and the constellations they form is hyper-structured, materially articulated, and instantly recognizable. Interested in the social and economic patterns that structure urban American society, the work is an amalgamation of social materials with built-in history. While the Abstract Expressionists such as Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock represent a new order of modern sublimity, with surfaces divested of image or material that is explicitly referential, Mark Bradford’s work grounds sublime visual experience in the use of functionally specific materials that are social bounded and have their own lifet.mes s and histories prior to incorporation in his work. Like Ellsworth Kelly, Bradford’s work is based off quotidian forms observed in the world; but Bradford’s innovation, exemplified in Burn Baby Burn, is the ability to merge an ethic of abstraction—articulating the unrepresentable through the abstract and indeterminate—with a realist approach to engaging with the physical traces of human motion through the world and critiquing structural failures of the logic of economy.

Like Ellsworth Kelly, Bradford’s work is based off quotidian forms observed in the world; but Bradford’s innovation, exemplified in Burn Baby Burn, is the ability to merge an ethic of abstraction—articulating the unrepresentable through the abstract and indeterminate—with a realist approach to engaging with the physical traces of human motion through the world and critiquing structural failures of the logic of economy.

Burn Baby Burn is a perfect articulation of Bradford’s visual and conceptual goals, an assemblage which retains a feeling of weightlessness despite the countless layers of paper covering the surface of the painting. It functions as both social critique and aesthetic object, and like the best of Bradford’s work epitomizes the visual and conceptual impulses that, as Christopher Bedford writes, have “fundamentally reshaped the visual and verbal languages of contemporary art, while attending with still-greater concentration to breaking down the conceptual abstractions that are used to divide communities from one another and constrain their vitality in a context adumbrated by the city where he lives, a city in which fragmentation, spread, and osmosis have already established new paradigms of hybridity. Bradford is the pictorial poet of that process, and his prospects stretch as far as the eye can see.” (Ibid.)