Mark Bradford valuation
Builds abstract paintings from layers of paper, merchant posters and hair-salon end papers, then sands and tears them back.
Mark Bradford was born in Los Angeles in 1961 and grew up in South Los Angeles, where his mother ran a beauty salon in Leimert Park; after school he qualified as a hairdresser and worked in the salon.
What a work by Mark Bradford is worth
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Bio
Mark Bradford was born in Los Angeles in 1961 and grew up in South Los Angeles, where his mother ran a beauty salon in Leimert Park; after school he qualified as a hairdresser and worked in the salon. He studied at Santa Monica College and then the California Institute of the Arts, where he took his BFA in 1995 and his MFA in 1997. His early collages used the end papers from hair permanents, and his large abstract paintings are built from layers of paper, merchant posters and string, then gouged, torn, sanded and power-washed back, so that they read like maps of a city. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2009, represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2017, and was named among Time's hundred most influential people in 2021.
Bradford's paintings are large and mostly held by museums and major collections; works on paper and prints appear more often. Provenance through his gallery and exhibition history are what buyers check first.
Leimert Park, Venice and Pickett's Charge
His Venice pavilion of 2017 was called Tomorrow Is Another Day, and the same year Pickett's Charge, a cyclorama of paintings for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, went on view.
His end-paper collages of 2000 were shown in Freestyle, Thelma Golden's survey of young African American artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001.
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