2024-09-09 13:59:56
With abstract paintings, works on paper and lively videos, Mark Bradford has become one of the most acclaimed artists of today. The Californian doesn’t even want to be an activist – even though his issues are tough.
“Blah, blah, blah,” said Mark Bradford, rolling his eyes and putting his hands in front of the microphone set up in the Rieckhallen of the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Till Fellrath and Sam Bardaouil, co-directors of the National Gallery for Contemporary Art, as the museum has been calling itself for almost two years, are about to say a few words to the enthusiastic journalists at the press conference.
But Bradford shook up the process a bit. He likes to take a tour of the exhibition himself. Acting but also making a reluctant gesture – today’s actors are rarely so confident in official events.
Mark Bradford, a boyish, slow-witted man who is taller than many of those present and who is 62 years old has never shown up, has come to Berlin from California to open his show “Keep Walking”. Museum management can then explain that this is an affirmative sentence. On the one hand it means self-assurance to continue moving, on the other hand it means the request not to delay traffic.
Rieckhallen reopened with Mark Bradford
The current museum was opened in 1848 as a railway station, but soon closed again as it was too small. It later served as a transportation and construction museum, but was almost completely destroyed at the end of World War II. Some of the tracks in the area were used for evacuation, the remnants of which are now a reminder of Nazi terror.
Railway traffic under influence, that is also the motivation for Fellrath and Bardaouil to invite Mark Bradford to a show. There are two monumental paintings hanging in the main room of the Rieckhallen near the museum. They are inspired by American railroad eras from the 1920s.
If you look closely, columns of raised numbers and unpronounceable words like “Railroad” appear below the surface of the paint. A century ago, trains left the southern cities for industrial areas to the north and west at frequent intervals.
This is also due to the fact that hundreds of thousands of African Americans set out to find work there and escape racism: the “Great Migration” is one of the largest migration movements in US history. With his paintings, Bradford evokes the ambivalences of industrial progress and mass accumulation.
Jugend in South Central
Typically, Bradford’s paintings are in the tradition of modernism, abstract expressionism and conceptual minimalism, but also of striking pop art. He became known for his large works on paper that were reminiscent of the construction of demolished billboards.
He works with maps, uses movie posters and comics. The exhibition also includes “Trader’s publications,” which refers to the advertising of illegal activities known from economically disadvantaged areas – he spent the first eleven years of his life in South Central Los Angeles.
The silk wraps her mother wraps around the ends of her clients’ hair in her hair salon to protect them support Bradford’s early career. He studied art at the prestigious CalArt Institute. Before that, he worked as a hairdresser himself – which explains why he is not shy away from approaching people and why he greets visitors to his exhibition with a hand.
The gigantic painting “Float”, an impressive tripping hazard, is also approached in a different way: it is on the ground and has painted lines of canvas and colored threads. For Bradford, painting is always a “matter of space”. And the large amount of space in the Rieckhallen convinced the artist. He was also able to lose the Friedrich Christian Flick collection, which first led to the 300-meter long building block that Hamburger Bahnhof acquired.
When it became clear a few years ago, also through research by this newspaper, that they were not in the museum and had to be demolished by the owner to build a new one on the fillet property, things did not look good for Hamburger. Bahnhof. Flick canceled his loan. Thanks to financial support from the federal government, the building and the Rieckhallen are now protected. Bradford, who is represented internationally by the Hauser & Wirth gallery, is now the first artist to fill with the exhibition again.
Walking on colored joints is said to create a feeling of safety. Sad because in museums you often need to click on the picture. Looking across the patchwork carpet is a video projection in the next room. We see a man walking down a street with a spring in his step in chunky shoes, tucking his hips in tight yellow pants.
Mark Bradford says: “Melvin has been behind my studio for years, and at one point I asked him if I could film him.” He called his video “Niagara,” after the 1953 feature film in which Marilyn Monroe’s performance was less appreciated by modern critics than her provocative hip swing. Melvin’s metal, on the other hand, according to Bradford, did not please everyone in the community and even angered some people.
The memory of the roller skating disco
His own life, Bradford said, was “hard.” He first learned how to live as a black, heterosexual man outside of nightclubs. The fact that, as a member of a generation that was one of the first to be able to go to college, he did not become a lawyer or a doctor, but rather an actor, needs to be explained.
But he didn’t think twice about the characteristics from others. People ignore the fact that your work, which you can be sure is a social work, cannot be understood. He “likes to go to places where the community doesn’t know a bit about art or sex scenes or anything.”
But in conversation he made it clear: “I’m an artist, not a terrorist!” His works are not real, not incriminating. They encourage you to think, but don’t ask for it, like some of today’s artists who develop their work as advertising with character. Bradford apparently does not need to moralize. He relies on the aesthetic power of art.
In the panoramic video “Deimos,” for example, yellow and orange rubber rollers fly over the entire picture, while the disc hits the “Thank you” plays, slightly slowed down. Background: In 2007, the New York roller skating disco Roxy had to close, becoming one more important place for the gay movement. The singer, Sylvester, who, like Bradford, lives in Los Angeles, was a victim of AIDS in the early 1980s. The wild ride of the bicycles torn from their shoes can be seen with a bitter voice, but the video also can be experienced as a Dadaist-nostalgic dance of objects.
“The concept of what an artist does in the 21st century needs to be expanded,” Bradford said, explaining his perspective on discrimination and identity. “I decided what I was interested in and what I was responsible for then.” He doesn’t see activism as his job – but educating viewers of his art is.
“Mark Bradford. Keep Walking”
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