Mark Bradford presents his new paintings online: the "Quarantine Paintings"

Kicking off Sept. 8 is the exhibition Quarantine Paintings, a solo show by Mark Bradford (Los Angeles, 1961) that will be held entirely online, presented by Hauser & Wirth Gallery. The works on display were created by Bradford during confinement to contain the Covid-19 pandemic contagion (hence the title of the exhibition).This is a series whose goal is to explore the nature of art during isolation, and to investigate what it means to create in times of heightened uncertainty. The works will be presented through photographs of the works themselves and their details, along with installation views of the works, set up in an empty space in Hauser & Wirth’s Los Angeles office.

The works are three in number and are titled Q1, Q2 and Q3: they consist of grid-like structures that appear, disappear and reappear between large black spots and red, yellow and orange paper stripes. The compositions are then traversed by blues, greens and browns that evoke natural environments, suggesting a kind of relationship between competing natural and artificial forces. And again, bursts of electric colors offer stroboscopic effects. For this series, Bradford also abandoned some elements typical of his earlier art, such as hot areas, surface lesions, and paper lifts that became symbols of violence, rupture, and decay.

These works, thus flatter than some earlier works, are in fact intended to avoid placement in a specific time or place. This particularity is meant to recall the way in which the pandemic has distanced us from our usual ideas of time and space, and also seeks to reflect the abstraction of our individual and collective experiences from the rest of society. So, if Bradford has spent the last two decades of his career creating paintings that investigate specific economic, political, and social forces that exclude and marginalize the most vulnerable communities, his Quarantine Paintings take an oblique approach to the challenges facing the world today.

An approach that, moreover, is also fostered by the choice of the exhibition’s format: since it is a virtual exhibition, visible therefore only through a digital platform, the contrast between a past made up of live encounters that we took for granted and a present marked by uncertainty, isolation, and the feeling that the whole world is going through a kind of out-of-body experience is highlighted.

In this context, Bradford’s Quarantine Paintings intends to focus on the role of art vis-à-vis society, especially when the latter loses its consistency. And with the online exhibition format, the exhibition aims to invite everyone to contact Bradford’s works while denying a more intimate access made up of physical presence, opening up an experience that underscores the urgency of art and of being together at a time like the one we are passing through.

For more information (and to see the exhibition), the reference site is that of Hauser & Wirth Gallery.

Mark Bradford presents his new paintings online: the "Quarantine Paintings"

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