An Opening on the Left, executed in 2010, is a stunning example from the oeuvre of Mark Bradford, an American who is named one of the top talents at the forefront of redefining the notion of painting today. By marrying high art with popular culture, Bradford creates large scale canvases that are true examples of Post-Modernism, in a different and more labour-intensive way than other artists like Wade Guyton who opted towards the process-based painting. Usually of monumental scale, the canvases are created with the use of paint and collage elements taken from everyday life: the found posters and billboards, hairdresser's permanent endpapers (he grew up in his mother’s hairdresser salon) - all traces of the city where he finds them - creating the urban map of his native Los Angeles. This results in a highly textured surface that is extremely gestural and abstract but that has an unbelievably utopian quality: “I wanted to take an actual moment in history and then abstract it and pull it apart and then put it back together again. The painting is like a puzzle.” (Christopher Bedford, Against Abstraction, in Mark Bradford, exh.cat., Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, 2010, p. 24).

Bradford has emerged over the past decade as one of the most skilful and exciting artists of his generation, leading to his receipt of the MacArthur "genius" award in 2009 and a travelling mid-career retrospective the following year that was organised by Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio that travelled to Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Based in South Central Los Angeles, the artist brings the street art elements into his paintings through which he continues his investigation of class, race and gender in the United States. Wittily dubbed "if not the best painter working in America today then certainly the tallest" by Guy Trebay of the New York Times, Bradford creates a body of work that is less of a commentary on consumerism, but rather gives voice to the specific conditions that shape communities.

In An Opening on the Left, Bradford masters his trademark additive and subtractive process of collage and decollage which allows him to create a grid-like composition that evokes the aerial view of Los Angeles, whose structural integrity is being challenged. The artist paints, bleaches, tears, sands and embellishes his materials that through improvisation and accident make up utopian abstractions that are not only formally inventive but that are also able to transmit the real sense of everyday life. The mesmerising quality is in abundance for the viewers to grasp. The use of bright colours on the multi-layered surface give a luminosity to the painting which exhales the raw energy and complex beauty. Through his paintings, Bradford conveys the collage-like way of Los Angeles itself, where growing up as an African-American and being part of the integral community he experienced firsthand the challenges of social integration, the pressing issue for a collage-like society not only locally but rather globally. In his painting, Bradford maps our culture of today, by showing its fragility and complexity: “Maps to me are such fragile systems, because at the moment of a war, at the moment of gentrification, they change. So they're the most inflexible, flexible thing I can think of. They imbue you with this security, and at the same time they're deeply, deeply flawed. They document the history of power; they document the history of wars. Maps document lots of lies... Maps to me are tricky and insidious, and they’ve always fascinated me” (T. Golden, Mark Bradford: The Other Side of Perfect, October 2006, www.worldclassboxing.org).

Bradford's canvases evoke the masters of classical abstraction, in particular the works of Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock. However, here the abstraction is taken to another level through the use of the collage elements that are products of the mass culture, making his painting as ever socially grounded. The high art temple that painting has been for centuries is masterfully tweaked to incorporate the ever changing world: “Bradford sets out to represent and reflect on the conditions of the moment, making images and objects that better represent the era than any documentary photography.” (The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol, exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012, p. 96). This ability to grasp and masterfully reflect the time we live in is what makes Bradford’s work so appealing.