Mark Bradford: Merchant Posters

This book gathers for the first time an extensive selection of American artist―or “builder and demolisher,” as he describes himself―Mark Bradford's gorgeous, searing and heavily textured “merchant posters.” The original printed posters, collected by Bradford from around his Central Los Angeles neighborhood, are brightly colored local advertisements that target the area's vulnerable lower-income residents. For Bradford, they serve as both the formal and conceptual underpinnings of his works on paper, décollages/collages that engage with the pressures of the cityscape. “The sheer density of advertising creates a psychic mass, an overlay that can sometimes be very tense or aggressive,” he notes; “If there's a 20-foot wall with one advertisement for a movie about war, then you have the repetition of the same image over and over―war, violence, explosions, things being blown apart. As a citizen, you have to participate in that every day. You have to walk by until it's changed.” Eagerly antic