Mark Bradford - Editions & Works on Paper New York Tuesday, April 19, 2022 | Phillips
  • "Bradford’s series of 14 prints grew out of collage work inspired by neighborhood ‘merchant poster’—brightly colored local advertisements that target the area’s lower-income residents. For Bradford, these posters serve as both formal and conceptual points of departure for his artwork: ‘The sheer density of advertising creates a psychic mass, an overlay that can sometimes be very tense or aggressive,’ he has said, ‘As a citizen, you have to participate in that every day. You have to walk by until it’s changed.’ Devoid of color, scaled down, and abstracted, the merchant poster remnants in these prints are surrounded by a field of scratches, marks, and scuffs. Each print in the series was made using two different printing plates—one for the background and one for the central ‘poster’ image. The gritty, distressed background was achieved by printing from the backside of etching plates recycled from the Lower East Side Printshop, the innovative workshop with which Bradford collaborated to make these prints. The plates had been used for projects by other artists in the workshop, and their backs reflected the wear-and-tear of handling during prior printings. This re-use mirrors the kind of foraging and subsequent layering, tearing, and sanding of found materials that Bradford deploys in his collage work. The square central motif containing text was printed and collaged onto these background sheets using a photo-transfer method that allowed Bradford to recycle text from other merchant poster–based work. These posters’ texts, such as ‘My Child Says Daddy/Child Custody/Divorce/Visitation’ and ‘Create a New Credit File Legally!’ have different levels of legibility from print to print, reflecting the artist’s process of hand-tracing and outlining words and phrases from the original street posters." —Judy Hecker, Mark Bradford’s Urban Etchings, April 2, 2015 

69

Untitled

2012
The complete set of 14 etchings and photogravure, with Chine collé to wove paper, the full sheets.
all S. 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
All signed, dated, annotated 'from a set of 14' and numbered 10/25 in pencil on the reverse, published by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, all framed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$25,000 - 35,000 

Sold for $25,200

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Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 19 - 21 April 2022