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| Mark Bradford, Kingdom Day, 2010, mixed media collage on canvas. Image via themodern.org. |
Kingdom comes in time for museum's tenth anniversary
A monumental painting by artist Mark Bradford (b. 1961), Los Angeles, will be unveiled as part of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth's tenth anniversary celebration, the first in the Modern’s collection. Crafting semi-abstract paintings from fragments of the urban environment—billboard paper, posters, newsprint, and street debris—Bradford’s works are layered with multiple materials and meanings. An African American who grew up in south-central Los Angeles, the artist’s richly textured collages merge his fascination of the personal space of painting with the sprawling, continually changing street facades of the city and the particular political and racial tensions that still exist there.
The Modern’s newly acquired painting is titled Kingdom Day, 2010, and is one of Bradford’s most ambitious works to date, consisting of four 10-by-10-foot canvases. An homage to the Kingdom Day Parade in Los Angeles, which takes place every January on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the work specifically refers to the 1992 parade, the same year four policemen were tried and acquitted for beating Rodney King, inciting riots throughout Los Angeles. The painting, which on first take appears almost abstract, presents an ambiguous and turbulent image. Various colored banners and words are obscured by a field of gestures that resemble sparks from an explosion. At the same time, the painting suggests a topographical read: a satellite view of the Southern California coast covered by violent atmospheric static.
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