Mark Bradford - Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York Wednesday, May 15, 2024 | Phillips

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  • I will never understand this society

    First they try to murder me then they lie to me

    Product of a dying breed

    All my homies trying weed

    Now the little baby's crazed raised off Hennessy

    Tell me, will my enemies flee when they see me?

    Believe me, even thugs gotta learn to take it easy

    —2pac

     

    With Starin’ Through My Rear View, 2006, Mark Bradford puts forth an electrifying composition that takes detritus found on the streets of Los Angeles to subtly reflect on the history, social structures and lived experiences of the artist’s urban environment. Domestically scaled, Starin’ Through My Rear View, is distinct within Bradford’s oeuvre for its sandal at center, which comes from a lineage of shoe motifs used in select works from 2004–2005. Whereas most of Bradford’s works in the intervening years teeter towards abstraction, the present example powerfully links to the artist’s recent embrace of figurative compositions since 2022.

     

    Bradford works with layers of printed matter in a manner more like painting than traditional collage. With sheets upon sheets of meticulously laid paper that has been torn, sanded and submersed in water, Starin’ Through My Rear View is a masterwork of bricolage, inherently linked to ideas of memory, place and time through its use of found materials. The title of the present example importantly references the 1996 Tupac (2pac) Shakur song of the same name, which was recorded in the last year of Shakur’s brief life for the film Gang Related, in which he also starred.

     

    Starin’ Through My Rear View dates to a key moment in Bradford’s practice that precipitated his rise to becoming one of the most significant contemporary American artists. In 2006 Bradford won the Whitney Museum of American Art’s prestigious Buscksbaum Award, which was followed by an acclaimed solo exhibition at the museum in 2007, and was included in important group exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Royal Academy of Arts, London, as well as the Whitney Biennial. 

    “He has developed an idiom that is both abstract and representational, aloof and immediate, urgently political and at the same time secretive, beautiful, obscure.”
    —Sebastian Smee

    With the title Starin’ Through My Rear View Bradford pays homage to the late rapper, a profoundly influential voice who is remembered for both his music and activism. It is characteristic of what the artist has coined ‘social abstraction’: abstract compositions “with a social or political context clinging to the edges.”i The song Starin’ Through My Rear View poetically laments gun violence and has taken on a cruel irony considering Shakur’s death mere months later in a drive-by shooting. The song’s lyrics, such as “I wonder when the world stopped caring / Last night two kids shot while the whole block staring,” call attention to the bizarre mundaneness of gun violence. In Bradford’s posthumous nod to the artist, we of course remember how Shakur’s death was nationally mourned. The title lyric goes on to represent a message of optimism and determination: “While I'm staring at the world through my rearview / See, I'm seeing nothin' but my dreams coming true.

    “My paintings are made up of tearing… To me it represents a process that is more of a reality than laying down a perfect line of paint. It’s raw, and a little violent, but it still comes together.”
    —Mark Bradford

    In 2004 Bradford began working with print media such as informal street advertisements, merchant posters and notices culled from neighborhoods near his South Central Los Angeles studio. His works from this period feature layers of fragmented papers meticulously worked to form complex compositions. Bradford’s process is as much one of excavation as it is one of collecting and compiling: he soaks his materials, tears through layers and selectively sands away strata to shape his composition. Papers come to his studio in pre-exiting stacks as he gathers layers of posters that organically accumulate in public spaces. Bradford poetically reflects on his source material: “Since the weather does not change much in Southern California, urban imagery, whether formal or informal, has a longer shelf life on the streets and in the Sky. … Consequently, the weather and the fact that city workers do not routinely clean the rubbish as frequently in this part of the city allows the material to cling to the fences and buildings, until the last pitiful breath has been exhumed from the paper.”ii

     

    Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Image: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Corcoran Collection (Gift of Philip Brookman and Amy Brookman), 2015.19.5295, Artwork: © Ed Ruscha

     

    Bradford’s early works are inextricably connected to Los Angeles from their use of material sourced from the city’s streets. In some ways his work is like an excavation of the streetscape, culling its ephemeral material culture. Boulevards, sprawl and roadway text have been an essential source for fellow Angeleno Ed Ruscha, whose works similarly explore the built urban landscape although via a markedly different visual language. Whereas Ruscha took on a structuralist approach to documenting Los Angeles’ streetscape, Bradford’s work reflects the organic, citizen-made landscape in continuous flux, built piece by piece and characterized by neighborhood businesses like his mother’s beauty shop. As Robert Storr describes, “Bradford’s work cuts to the chase by teasing an indigenous West Coast way of making an allover picture out of the everyday alloverness of the City of Angels, or more accurately the City of Fallen Angels.”iii Further explaining his approach, Bradford states, "The tools of civilization, how we build and destroy ourselves, are the materials that I'm really interested in.”

    Tupac Shakur: Starin’ Through My Rear View

     

    Collector’s Digest

    • 2006, the year Starin’ Through My Rear View was created, Bradford was the recipient of the Whitney Museum’s Bucksbaum Award. He mounted his first major institutional solo exhibition at the museum in 2007 entitled Neither New Nor Correct.

    • Bradford represented United States in 2017 Venice Biennale with the exhibition Tomorrow Is Another Day.

    • His monumental, site-specific installation Pickett’s Charge is currently on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

     

     

    iMark Bradford quoted in Calvin Tomkins, “What Else Can Art Do?,” The New Yorker, June 22, 2015, online

    iiMark Bradford in Neither New Nor Correct: New Work by Mark Bradford, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2007, p. 9

    iiiRobert Storr in Mark Bradford, exh. cat., Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, 2010, p. 4

    • Condition Report

    • Description

      View our Conditions of Sale.

    • Provenance

      Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
      The Cap Collection (acquired from the above)
      Sotheby’s, New York, March 7, 2014, lot 209
      Private Collection (acquired at the above sale)
      Thence by descent to the present owner

340

Starin' Through My Rear View

signed with the artist's initial, titled and dated "Starin' Through My Rear View m 2006" on the reverse
acrylic, paper collage and wax resin on canvas
44 7/8 x 63 1/4 in. (114 x 160.7 cm)
Executed in 2006.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$350,000 - 450,000 

Place Advance Bid
Contact Specialist

Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com

Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session

New York Auction 15 May 2024