Mark Bradford
Masses and Movements
19 Jul – 31 Oct 2021

Mark Bradford’s exhibition, ‘Masses and Movements’, inaugurates the gallery’s newest location on Isla del Rey in the port of Mahon in Menorca.

Continuing his career-long exploration of the systems that oppress marginalized populations, Bradford’s newest exhibition features work rich in both formal and allegorical complexity, reasserting the importance of abstraction to understand the world we live in and confirming his place among the most important artists working today.

‘Masses and Movements’ extends across seven gallery spaces. Integral to the exhibition is a new social engagement project that Bradford is collaborating on to bring arts education to immigrant communities and a display that highlights the global immigration crisis.

Explore the exhibition

For his first exhibition in Spain, Mark Bradford presents an installation of globe sculptures, a site-specific wall painting, and a suite of new canvases based on a sixteenth-century map of the world thought to feature the first use of the name ‘America’ in print.

MB Education Lab

In direct response to Mark Bradford’s ‘Masses and Movements’, the Education Lab is dedicated to showcasing PILAglobal and features an artistic intervention emphasizing the vast, interconnected nature of the refugee crisis today. Site-specific wall drawings created in collaboration with students from the local Escola d’Art de Menorca spotlight popular migration routes around the globe.

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Throughout his career, Bradford has employed his signature style of archaeological abstraction to explore maps of the world of all different kinds, unpacking social and political systems that objectify and marginalize vulnerable populations. Using maps of cities, neighborhoods, public housing developments, and trade routes, the artist has unpacked the embedded biases that define the barriers and boundaries we inhabit, revealing a world predetermined by power structures. For ‘Masses and Movements’, Bradford inverts this, instead reaching for a source image many times removed from a realistic representation of the world.

Using maps of cities, neighborhoods, public housing developments, and trade routes, the artist has unpacked the embedded biases that define the barriers and boundaries we inhabit, revealing a world predetermined by power structures. For ‘Masses and Movements’, Bradford inverts this, instead reaching for a source image many times removed from a realistic representation of the world.

‘Maps have always been shady. So much of what we understand about landmasses comes from cartographers and their relationships to power, and the need to always keep a place for Europe at the center of history. I’m interested in the potential for abstraction to pull the stories from the margins onto the pages of that history.’—Mark Bradford

In the original Waldseemüller map from 1507, Europe, the Mediterranean Sea, the northern coast of Africa, and the Middle East are well-defined and recognizable to the modern eye. Approaching the edges, angular shapes represent masses of land without definition, unexplored regions yet to be drawn and divided by European colonial powers. Latin texts, illustrations of human figures, and angelic personifications of trade winds fill the margins lending fantastical overtones to the depiction of the world. Across the Atlantic Ocean, ‘America’ is printed over what would later become known as Brazil.

Beginning with fragments of this map, Bradford applied caulk in expressive gestures that drip and run across the surface. Various types of paper add layers of color, and bleach transforms the materials into a nuance of shades and textures.

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Suspended from the ceiling in a straight line in the centre of an adjacent gallery, seven globe sculptures of increasing sizes occupy the space, pushing visitors to the periphery. Black paper oceans surround crumpled masses of oxidized paper in the shapes of continents, harkening back to ancient fears of the sea as an unknowable and untameable ‘other’. Differing in sizes, the globes represent divergent experiences of a planet prearranged by inequitable access to power and privilege.

The final room in ‘Masses and Movements’ is dedicated to a display of art’s kinetic potential to center marginalized stories. Stacks of posters that visitors are invited to take feature advertisements for low interest home loans, foreclosure abeyance services, or cash for homes that Bradford collected around Los Angeles superimposed over images of deserts, oceans, border walls, and coastlines.

About the artist

Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Mark Bradford (b. 1961) is best known for his large-scale paintings that explore the socio-political potential of abstraction through a rigorous approach to painting. Bradford’s ongoing practice examines political and environmental conditions that continue to disproportionately affect the most marginalized populations. Within both historical and contemporary frameworks, Bradford has created a significant body of work that elucidates these issues, such as the AIDS epidemic, the misrepresentation and fear of queer identity, and systemic, institutionalized racism in America.

Inquire to learn about available works by Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford. Masses and Movements

This inaugural exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Menorca is on view 19 July – 31 October

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