Section T3

With its intricate sprawling network of monochromatic lines and shapes, Section T3 is a captivating large-scale monoprint from the celebrated oeuvre of Mark Bradford. It was created in 2010, the year after Bradford was elected to a MacArthur Genius Fellowship in recognition of his diverse and socially engaged artistic practice, grounded in the urban aesthetic of his Los Angeles neighborhood. Like his paintings, which use found scraps of paper and décollage techniques to create layered billboard-style tableaus, Bradford’s monoprints express the artist’s fascination with the fissured, ruptured patterns that define our daily existence. His creative eye is rooted in the archaeological and the topographical: from childhood memories of sidewalks split apart by earthquakes, to the mesmerizing cartography of freeways and autobahns seen from Google Earth, to the residual traces of peeling merchant posters on the city walls that surround his home. “I wanted to play with the idea of the lens and the farther away you are, it then becomes really topographical and it becomes about geography, land shifts, and looking down from a distance. Then I wanted to zoom in really tight, where it almost felt like bubbling, hot asphalt”, the artist has claimed (M. Bradford, Mark Bradford: Through Darkest America by Truck and Tank, exh. cat., White Cube, London, 2013, p. 75). The knotted infrastructure of the present work, invoking both the galactic and the microscopic, is an eloquent example of this vision. Through its textural and linear virtuosity, Bradford’s work captures the junctures, collisions and intersections that constitute the life-force of both the natural and man-made world.