"I’m always aware of where I want it to end up. I know I want it to be abstract, I know I want it to have social/political content clinging to the edges, at the fringe, and I know I want it to have a robust quality."
—Mark Bradford 

Executed in 2013 and presented in the artist’s major presentation with White Cube in London the same year, Nodding Gunpowder is a monumental expression of American artist Mark Bradford’s careful attention to the realities of urban life in America, and the complex interplay of class, race, and history that shape our social experience. Alongside a sister work Riding the Cut Vein which now resides in the permanent collection of London’s Tate Galleries, Nodding Gunpowder is a masterful example of Bradford’s distinctive and socially-anchored mode of abstraction. Foregrounding ideas of process and materiality, its restrained palette of black, white, and grey focuses our attention on the expressive force of the artist’s command of materials and line. Strikingly topographic in nature, the surface is whipped and whorled like the ariel imaging of a storm system, with ‘[s]weeping movements of lines converging and parting to create peaks and valleys across the canvas’.ⁱ

 

Charged with a magnetic energy, this cartographic quality goes far beyond visual comparison, rooted in Bradford’s sustained investigation into American social history and class, his commitment to materials found in his immediate urban environment, and his fascination with the relationship between history, class, and the lived experience of urban space foregrounded in his 2013 White Cube exhibition.
 

 

Trucks, Tanks, and the Topographic 

 

His second exhibition with the gallery, Through Darkest America by Truck and Tank took its title from a chapter in former American President Dwight D Eisenhower’s memoir which focused on his time as a member of the Transcontinental Motor Convoy of 1919. This, coupled with the president’s observation of the efficiencies of the German autobahn system during World War II led to a championing of a national highway system, which in turn radically reshaped the urban environments that these snaking roads carved through. Using the map of the National System of Interstate and Defence Highways as the basis for the paintings in the exhibition Bradford explains: ‘I wanted to play with the idea of the lens and the farther away you are, it then becomes really topographical and it becomes about geography, land shifts, and looking down from a distance. Then I wanted to zoom in really tight, where it almost felt like bubbling, hot asphalt.’ⁱⁱ

 

What had originally been conceived as a preemptive military manoeuvre to maintain control in the event of land invasion, the 10 - which snakes from Los Angeles to New York - also tore through the communities it passed through, including the artist’s own Los Angeles. Deeply fascinated by this mode of spatial and social engineering Bradford explains ‘what is interesting to me about freeways is that they always cut through poor neighbourhoods. Poor people have a much more immediate relationship to freeways because they are usually in their backyards. A freeway is a class marker, depending on which side of the freeway you’re on.’ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Abstract Histories

These ruptures and fissures are profoundly communicated in the present work, the surface riven with surging striations that place issues of materiality and process at the forefront of discussions of Bradford’s practice. Indeed, while the monumental scale and rhythmic intensity of Nodding Gunpowder recalls Jackson Pollock’s all-over compositions, these visual connections work to further emphasise Bradford’s radical departure from the tradition of a predominantly white, male American Abstract Expressionism and its celebration of the individual and gestural immediacy. 

 

Expansive and densely layered, the present work uses the material of everyday, urban life - billboard sheets, newspapers, and posters - showcasing Bradford’s consistent ‘investment in social materials that have a “built-in history.”’^iv On a material level, these urban materials are heavily saturated class signifiers, the content of certain billboard posters and flyers targeted at specific demographics within different pockets of the city. Scouring the streets surrounding his Los Angeles studio for these found materials, Bradford also highlights the extent to which working with this ‘brutal material […] has so much to do with the hand, it's process, which has to do with class.’^v

 

Having accumulated this found and custom printed material, Bradford soaks the paper in large vats of water before pressing it into the surface of the canvas, tracing hand-drawn lines with a caulking gun, providing ‘a sub-layer of linear structure, billboard material, fragments of found text and, of course paper upon paper upon paper.’^vi Accreting materials and creating highly textured palimpsests of arresting formal beauty in this manner, Bradford then sands the surface back, at once obliterating and emphasising the paper palimpsests beneath. Fusing image, material, and context in compelling and arresting ways, Bradford’s multi-layered compositions explore tensions between abstraction and representation, crucially asking viewers to confront the history and lived realities he invokes.

 

Bradford applies this keen sense of historical and political consciousness to his own position in histories of American abstraction too. Asking us to think more deeply about the condition of Black artists in their historical specificity Bradford acknowledges Black abstraction as something ‘completely separate from the dominant narrative of the time’.^vii Scouring the pages of obscure art journals and catalogues, Bradford found a kindred spirit in the figure of Jack Whitten, whose innovative approach to material and technique provided Bradford with a lineage not only in terms of painterly experiment, but in his ability to deploy abstraction to more socially reflective ends.

 

 

Collector’s Digest 

 

• Widely celebrated as one of the most influential artists of his generation, Mark Bradford resides in Los Angeles, the city where he was born in 1961.

• Since his breakthrough in the early 2000s, Bradford has exhibited widely, with significant solo presentations at major international institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, and the Long Museum in Shanghai.

• Most recently, Bradford has been awarded the Gordon Parks Foundation Award, an honour reserved for individuals whose work enriches lives and inspires the next generation.

• The present work was included in Bradford’s 2013 exhibition at White Cube, Bermondsey, A sister work, Riding the Cut Vein now forms part of the permanent collection of Tate, London.

 

ⁱ Christopher Bedford, ‘Patterns of Intention’, in Mark Bradford: Through Darkest America By Truck and By Stop, (exh. cat.), London, 2013, p. 99.
ⁱⁱ Mark Bradford, quoted in Susan May, ‘Call and Response’: A Conversation with Mark Bradford’ in Mark Bradford: Through Darkest America By Truck and By Stop, (exh. cat.), London, 2013, p. 75.
ⁱⁱⁱ Mark Bradford, quoted in Susan May, ‘Call and Response’: A Conversation with Mark Bradford’ in Mark Bradford: Through Darkest America By Truck and By Stop, (exh. cat.), London, 2013, p. 75. 
^iv Christopher Bedford, Mark Bradford (exh. cat), Wexner Centre for the Arts, The Ohio State University, Columbus, 2010, p. 11. 
^v Mark Bradford, quoted in Mark Bradford, quoted in Susan May, ‘Call and Response’: A Conversation with Mark Bradford’ in Mark Bradford: Through Darkest America By Truck and By Stop, (exh. cat.), London, 2013, p. 80. 
^vi Christopher Bedford, ‘Patterns of Intention’, in Mark Bradford: Through Darkest America By Truck and By Stop, (exh. cat.), London, 2013, p. 100.
^vii Mark Bradford, quoted in Mark Bradford, quoted in Susan May, ‘Call and Response’: A Conversation with Mark Bradford’ in Mark Bradford: Through Darkest America By Truck and By Stop, (exh. cat.), London, 2013, p. 80.