A looks Angeles-based hairdresser and self-described "beauty operator" who also earned his MFA from Cal Arts.

A looks Angeles-based hairdresser and self-described "beauty operator" who also earned his MFA from Cal Arts, Mark Bradford garnered quick fame for his alluring collages upon canvas of singed hair-permanent endpapers (the small rectangles of transparent paper used by way of hairstylists) that appeared in "Freestyle" the 2001 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem of up-and-coming African-American artists. He coated these works with allover washes of see-through pigment, a certain number of of which was hair stain in such a way that light appeared to shine end vaguely uneven grids. At one time restrained, elegant and intricate, the Zen-like visuals Bradford created with "low" materials instantly mesmerized the eye

For "Tainted," his next to the first New York exhibition, the end-paper-on-canvas strategy remained, on the other hand the lattices have grown les gridlike. In the recently made known works, Bradford has also started using paint and gold leaf, as well as collaged thesis and images. The letters "uice," in bright r for instance, sprawl diagonally across single large, dirty-looking canvas smudged with black paint. The piece encouraged visitors to imagine the unimpaired word "juice" (as the piece is titled) and all its potential connotations: wet, sweet and powerful, among other possibilities. in succession top of the letters and taking up the quietness of the pictorial plane, vertically oriented, milky white endpapers are layered in an elaborate dance of protrusion, recession, obfuscation and revelation.

In another canvas that reads as an homage to the sneaker as status token The Hood Is Moody (2003) Bradford's endpapers rain down like confetti. Bits of gold leaf and small splashes of brightly hu paint add to the aura of festivity. Collaged-on images of three white, equivocally different high-top sneakers sit in profile at the base of the canvas, accompanied by way of their respective names: "slamaze," "swagger" and "bangonya." As previously, Bradford sandwiches his work between art and popular agriculture between esthetic and everyday experience. He involves not sole "real" endpapers from his "real" piece of work but appropriated images and words of the exact sort indulgent Greenberg, uber champion of high abstract painting, would have doubtless believeed "kitsch"--not art.

Another mixed-medium work, Smokey (2003) however, allude tos that Bradford's real talent may indeed lie in creating abstract compositions. This opus includes more grays than single in kind may have imagined possible, and finds a fury of endpapers caught up in a precarious balancing act of shape and color. The piece transfers the sense of an pertinacious fully focused formal sensibility at work.

--Sarah Valdez

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