Provenance Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2005 Exhibited Columbus, The Ohio State University, Wexner Center for the Arts; Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; Dallas Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Mark Bradford, May 8, 2010 - May 20, 2012, no. 14, pp. 114, 227 (detail illustrated, p. 94; illustrated, n.p.) Literature Dorothy Spears, “Hoop Dreams of His Own Design,” New York Times, December 12, 2010 (illustrated, online) Elena Martinique, “Mark Bradford at Venice Biennale 2017 as the US Representative,” Whitewalls, April 19, 2016 (illustrated, online) Jonathan Grifn, “Mark Bradford: That’s not gonna happen,” ArtReview, May 2017 (illustrated, online)
“I am an artist that paints with paper. I use billboard paper, culled from the streets. It has a use value. Usually the materials that I have have some use value in the world, and I begin to take these materials and form what I consider painting, sculptural painting.” Mark Bradford
Past, present and future collide as a twisting grid of black, red, blue and yellow rectangles detonates across the surface in Mark Bradford’s Black Venus, 2005. Residing for over a decade in the esteemed Berezdivin Collection, Black Venus evokes the irregular urban sprawl of Bradford’s native Los Angeles. Evidencing the full, electrifying force of an artist at the precipice of being recognized as one of the greatest painters of his generation, this exhilarating work belongs
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to the handful of paintings Bradford created in the mid-2000s that includes Los Moscos, 2004, Tate Modern, London, and Scorched Earth, 2006, Broad Museum, Los Angeles. This celebrated group of works signaled a dramatic shif in Bradford’s oeuvre, evidencing his frst engagement with the vernacular of map-making and his now signature approach of creating paintings from paper detritus salvaged from the streets of Los Angeles. As one of the
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