Bradford’s work is often packaged under the label of “social abstraction.” Yet this term directly contradicts the foundations of abstraction itself and functions more as a sanitized institutional rhetoric that half-erases its ethical and political implications. Abstraction was historically built on removing narrative and context, but Bradford’s surfaces contain direct traces of specific racial, class, and urban structures.

These traces are not mere materials; they are fragments of information embedded with the lived realities of particular communities. However, once such information is rearranged into an abstract composition, its content becomes blurred, its meaning encrypted, and its political sharpness neutralized.
 
Ultimately, his works are too specific to be called abstraction, and too harmless to be considered political practice. This contradictory tension is precisely the space Bradford occupies, and “social abstraction” serves mainly to mask that instability as an institutional euphemism.


 
A Lack of Formal Density

It is true that Bradford’s works produce a strong visual first impression. But visual impact cannot substitute for structural completeness. His surfaces are repeatedly constructed through similar methods of scraping, tearing, and layering—processes that tend to unfold less through deliberate formal judgment than through material contingency.

The monumental scale of his canvases can create an illusion of depth, but once one moves into the details, the formal decision-making proves loose and repetitive. The structural tension and chromatic organization historically central to abstraction do not play a decisive role in his work.

This reveals how the common discourse framing Bradford’s work as an ‘expansion of abstract painting’ significantly overestimates its formal weight. Surface complexity does not automatically produce formal depth, and Bradford’s work does not fully bridge that gap.
 


Rearranging an Old Discourse

The language that celebrates Bradford’s work as innovative overlooks a major lineage in American art from the 1990s and 2000s.

For decades, American institutions and critics have treated race, urban violence, poverty, class division, and gentrification as central themes. The 1993 Whitney Biennial stands as a defining moment in foregrounding these issues. During this period, many artists rigorously experimented with translating social structures and systems of violence into abstraction, diagrammatic languages, symbolic forms, and material residues.

Notably, Black artists such as David Hammons and Betye Saar developed strategies far earlier than Bradford to translate structural racism, urban fractures, and the memories and violences within Black communities into painterly, sculptural, and collage-based languages.

Hammons transformed urban debris, bodily traces, and street materials into political symbols, foregrounding institutional critique and the sensory weight of Black identity. Saar, in turn, constructed assemblages from the histories of Black women, family, and the civil rights movement, working to overturn racist iconography decades before Bradford. Their practices established a formal and conceptual vocabulary that restructured social forces, violence, and communal memory into visual form long before Bradford’s rise.

Given this lineage, the themes Bradford engages—urban fracture, racial politics, and the historical residues of Black communities—function less as novel proposals and more as repackaged versions of already institutionalized discourse. His work unites abstraction and social reality, but it does so by repeating a long-established set of linguistic and material strategies within Black artistic practice. Bradford therefore occupies a position not of avant-garde innovation, but of market-friendly and institutionally optimized recontextualization.
 


The Safety of Political Content and Institutional Convenience

Bradford’s work is often described as political because it addresses race and class. But the politics his work actually performs is calibrated to institutional needs. Conflict becomes diffuse structural trace; violence is absorbed into abstract pattern; messages disperse into ambiguous metaphor.

Such strategies convert political radicality into an aesthetic signal easily absorbed by major institutions—precisely the mode favored by the global art system today: works that contain political subject matter while evacuating genuine critical force. Bradford’s practice provides “safe politics,” a consumable form of radicality.

An Artist Who Stays on the Threshold

Bradford is often praised for expanding the boundary between abstraction and politics. In reality, his work remains on that boundary, maintaining a stable equilibrium rather than crossing it. The conflict between the concept of abstraction and the specificity of his materials, the looseness of his formal decisions, the repetition of pre-existing discourses, and a politics optimized for institutional circulation—together, these elements show that his language is not “new,” but moderated by institutional demands.
 
Reading Bradford’s exhibition critically therefore means looking beyond the works themselves to the broader system that shapes contemporary art: What does the art institution consume under the name of the political? What does it remove? What forces determine the form in which politics appears? These are the essential questions this exhibition urges us to consider.
 

 
Exhibition Information

Exhibition title :《Mark Bradford: Keep Walking》
Dates: August 1, 2025 (Fri) – January 25, 2026 (Sun)
Venue: Amorepacific Museum of Art, 100 Hangang-daero, Yongsan-gu, Seoul
Opening hours / Closed: Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00; closed Mondays, Jan 1, Lunar New Year & Chuseok holidays
Exhibition contents: Approx. 40 works including paintings, installations, and video. Highlights include Blue (2005), Niagara (2005), the 2019 installation Float, and a newly commissioned series for the museum.
Admission: Adults 16,000 KRW (discounts available for students and youth)