Scorched Earth presents an aerial map of a neighbourhood in Tulsa once known as 'Black Wall Street'. Mark disrupts the urban landscape with a huge swathe of intense black that represents both the physical and psychological scar of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921. Around Scorched Earth are small colourful forms that embody the varied and vivid lives impacted by the episode of white supremacist violence and arson.
When Mark painted the original in 2006, he also had in mind the destruction he had witnessed during the 1992 uprising in his hometown of Los Angeles. The edition was created in collaboration with The Broad — home to the original Scorched Earth — in celebration of the museum’s tenth anniversary.
Dimensions: 25.5 x 30 Inches
Medium: 20 colour silkscreen on 410gsm Somerset Tub Sized Radiant White paper.
Provenance: Hand-signed and numbered by the artist. Comes with gallery certificate of authenticity.
Edition: Limited Edition of 524
Year: 2025
Condition: Excellent
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Mark Bradford engages the discarded materials of urban life, often remnants of informal economic systems that arise out of necessity in the inner city. Bradford grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a family of hairdressers. From early on, he used the materials found around salons, including the paper rectangles used for permanents, bobby pins, and hair dyes. Over time, his art making grew to include video, installation, and photographs alongside his continued interest in printmaking and collage. Bradford describes his work: “Think about all the white noise out there in the streets: all the beepers and blaring culture—cell phones, amps, chromed-out wheels, and synthesizers. I pick up a lot of that energy in my work, from the posters, which act as memory of things pasted and things past. You can peel away the layers of papers and it’s like reading the streets through signs.”
In (Untitled) a.k.a. Gwen, 2005–6, Bradford develops a nuanced grid, recalling the energetic and often frenzied topology of a city map. Instead of delicate pencil work or precision painting of a formal modernist grid, the work is made from beauty salon tissue paper, handbills, and advertisements for jobs, lawyers, and other services posted in the neighborhoods around Bradford’s studio in South Central Los Angeles. While applying these materials, Bradford physically interacts with the work—sanding, tearing, bleaching, and weathering the surface. Bradford’s ephemeral materials not only come to wear the grit of outdoor signs and billboards but also reveal their temporary condition as objects that change according to the needs of those who employ them. In describing his practice, Bradford has quoted from Michel Laguerre’s The Informal City: “The informal arena provides a hidden space where one can stand to read the city as a social laboratory of everyday practice.”
Longo’s images depict violent physicality and psychological angst motivated by an undefined source left to the viewer’s speculation. His most famous series, Men in the Cities, consists of large charcoal and graphite drawings of well-dressed men and women between moments of confinement and release. These works have become metaphors for the success and money-driven “yuppie culture” of the 1980s. Untitled (Men in the Cities: Ellen), 1981, shows a young woman in such a moment of ambiguity, with a full and purposeful gesture yet unmoored to any definition beyond her stylish heels, proper blouse, and designer skirt.
Longo’s drawings gradually became larger and more ambitious and included many types of media, such as his cast aluminum relief sculptures. In Tongue to the Heart, 1984, a central lead-panel relief features an imposing, empty corridor. To its left a slightly smaller-than-life-size sculptural figure clamps his hands to his ears as if experiencing agony; to its right eyes in a large, red, mask shape stare out and up, floating disembodied on a black ground; and below yellow waves crash. Here, Longo presents a psychological scene of imprisonment and anxiety that hints at an unattainable, constantly threatened transcendence.
