MARK BRADFORD: EXOTICA

Hauser & Wirth presents ‘Exotica,’ a solo exhibition of new, formally innovative works by Mark Bradford.

September 26, 2024 – March 1, 2025

‘Exotica’ introduces a signature staining technique, wherein the artist uses caulk to create shadow-like imprints upon the canvas. These forms inject Bradford’s layered compositions with a trace of fantasy, strangeness, and memory. In its diversity of form and material – also encompassing works created with fabric dye, inked-paper, and oxidized paper – the exhibition reflects the continued evolution of Bradford’s play with figuration.

The exhibition’s title references a 1968 encyclopedia that catalogued exotic plants from a western perspective, for a western reader. The text took on special significance for Bradford in the way it reflects a colonial impulse to document and categorize the things perceived as ‘other,’ and the idea that naming something equates to understanding. Bradford took this catalogue as a starting point to consider how we create, imagine, and internalize such concepts of the ‘exotic,’ turning inward to examine his own preconceptions of what things are, and how those same preconceptions define his reality and experience.

Fifteen detail works take viewers into the woods – not any woods, but the woods of the artist’s imagination. As a black man growing up in an urban environment, Bradford attends to his own perceptions of the woods as something dangerous and foreign. These richly layered paintings extend Bradford’s treatment of the themes of migration and displacement, evoking the threats of a journey to, and through, the unknown.

Notably, this new body of works signals a significant shift in perspective, setting the viewer eye-to-eye with Bradford’s compositions and the fictions of the ‘exotic’ they contain.