Up Close: Mark Bradford

It is indicative of current art discourse that Hauser & Wirth’s press release for American painter Mark Bradford’s 2024 exhibition “Exotica” labors under the dead weight of preassigned interpretation, serving as a prime example of linguistic obfuscation in which a work’s ultimate, unknowable mystery is hidden beneath a veil of moral, social, and political context. Great art should speak for itself. The excessive reliance on defining the content and meaning of Bradford’s paintings—the colonial violence underpinning European plant taxonomy; the agave representing colonized peoples having to “conform and adapt to their circumstances”; and Bradford’s fear of the woods as a Black man—belies a richness of form and technique that, while not entirely innovative, still generates interest.