Art

“EXOTICA” MARK BRADFORD AT HAUSER & WIRTH HONG KONG

“Exotica” presents new, formally innovative works by Mark Bradford. In an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Gallery, Hong Kong, that extends the artist’s recent formal and thematic investigations, Bradford probes the enduring impact of colonialism and concepts of ‘otherness’ through the lens of individual experience.

The artist introduces a signature staining technique, wherein the artist uses caulk to create shadow-like imprints upon the canvas. These forms inject Bradford’s layered compositions with a trace of fantasy, strangeness, and memory. In its diversity of form and material—also encompassing works created with fabric dye, inked-paper, and oxidized paper—the exhibition reflects the continued evolution of Bradford’s play with figuration.

The show’s title references a 1968 encyclopedia that catalogued exotic plants from a western perspective, for a western reader. The text took on special significance for Bradford in the way it reflects a colonial impulse to document and categorize the things perceived as ‘other,’ and the idea that naming something equates to understanding.

Bradford took this catalogue as a starting point to consider how we create, imagine, and internalize such concepts of the ‘exotic,’ turning inward to examine his own preconceptions of what things are, and how those same preconceptions define his reality and experience.

Fifteen detail works take viewers into the woods—not any woods, but the woods of the artist’s imagination. As a black man growing up in an urban environment, Bradford attends to his own perceptions of the woods as something dangerous and foreign. These richly layered paintings extend Bradford’s treatment of the themes of migration and displacement, evoking the threats of a journey to, and through, the unknown.

The exhibition is anchored by four large-scale figurative works centered on the agave plant. A monocarpic variety, agave plants bloom only once, at the end of their lifecycle. Bradford was drawn to the idea that agave exposes its richness and full embodiment only once within its life, as a metaphor for peoples whose colonized conditions require them to conform and adapt to their circumstances, rather than to flourish.

Notably, this new body of works signals a significant shift in perspective, setting the viewer eye-to-eye with Bradford’s compositions and the fictions of the ‘exotic’ they contain.

EXOTICA
MARK BRADFORD
HAUSER & WIRTH GALLERY
HONGKONG
Through 25 March 2025
https://www.hauserwirth.com

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