“I like to walk through the city and find details and then abstract them and make them my own. I’m not speaking for a community or trying to make a sociopolitical point. At the end, it’s my mapping. My subjectivity.”
A masterful fusion of tactile materiality and abstracted gesture, Mark Bradford’s Drag Her To The Path from 2011 merges complex layers of social, historical, and personal significance in a powerful investigation of the contemporary urban experience. Emerging from the silvery ground, an intricate network of shadowy furrows and ridges coalesces into an undulating ebony mass; shimmering within this shadowy grid, prismatic veins of jewel-like pigment absorb the viewer in a mesmerizing vision of kaleidoscopic hue. Created through Bradford’s signature process of continual addition and subtraction, Drag Her To The Path courses with a stunning vitality that evinces the complex evolution of its phenomenally variegated surface. Throughout his groundbreaking career, Bradford has continued to push the frontiers of abstraction, creating a corpus of truly stunning works integrally connected to such varied sources as the histories of abstraction, cartography, and urban design; exemplified in Drag Her To The Path , the result is a labyrinthine web of collaged paper that provides an investigative metaphor for the regenerative vibrancy of metropolitan life.
Characteristic of the artist’s larger practice, the title of the present work is at once highly provocative and inherently ambiguous. While the striking title gestures towards an underlying narrative of urban violence, social injustice, or civil rights [EL1] issues– concerns which Bradford has spoken on innumerable t.mes s – Drag Her To The Path avoids any explicit references or assertions. Instead, Bradford masterfully weaves the implicit drama of this title into the extraordinary abstract surface of his work, instilling this painting with a conceptual framework that is as intriguing as it is elusive. Ultimately it is Bradford’s distinct entry into the realm of abstraction that allows him to give form to this unstable paradigm, best articulated through his description of his process: “I like to walk through the city and find details and then abstract them and make them my own. I’m not speaking for a community or trying to make a sociopolitical point. At the end, it’s my mapping. My subjectivity.” (the artist cited in “Market>Place,” Art21, November 2011, online)
Right: Julie Mehretu, Black City, 2007. Private collects ion. Art © 2020 Julie Mehretu
"It's like watching people use a sledgehammer to dig up concrete and then there's nature underneath. I thought I was retrieving some of my own work beneath the surface."
Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland, Art © 2020 Jack Whitten/Artist Rights Society (ARS) New York
Executed on an impressive scale, the richly textured topography of Drag Her To The Path is powerfully evocative of the urban sprawl which inspires Bradford’s practice. While the artist’s work is categorically considered within the realm of painting, both by the artist himself and the larger artistic community, his works cannot be described as painting in the traditional sense. Indeed, Bradford’s intricate compositions are a direct result of the artist’s immediate surroundings: working from a deliberately concentrated area directly adjacent to his studio, Bradford gathers a compendium of found materials, primarily paper, which determine the parameters of each distinct work and serve as the building blocks of his intricate and engaging final paintings. Within Bradford’s practice, formal abstraction is deftly weaponized as a means for potent social commentary; in the artist’s own words, “I may pull the raw material from a very specific place, culturally from a particular place, but then I abstract it. I’m only really interested in abstraction; but social abstraction, not just the 1950s abstraction. The painting practice will always be a painting practice but we’re living in a post-studio world, and this has to do with the relationship with things that are going on outside." (The artist cited in: Exh. Cat., London, White Cube, Through Darkest America by Truck and Tank, 2013-2014, p. 83) Through an extraordinary method of collage and décollage, Bradford first combines the found remnants of billboard posters, newsprint, and digitally-printed color sheets, then laboriously excavates and sands away segments to reveal an undulating landscape of labyrinthine grids and shimmering texture beneath. As Bradford puts it: "It's like watching people use a sledgehammer to dig up concrete and then there's nature underneath. I thought I was retrieving some of my own work beneath the surface." (The artist quoted in: Michele Carlson, "Mark Bradford Brings Mainstream to the Fringe," Art in America, 15 March 2012, online) Through this signature and labor-intensive process of tearing and overlaying, Bradford delineates zones like veins that run though and over the surface to articulate an aerial view of structures and passages that disrupt the web of images below. The artist indulges in semantic games where the layers of abstract forms, image and text accumulate strata of potential messages that never settle within a legible form.
