‘What are you doing in here’ (2018) is a consummate example of Mark Bradford’s distinctive visual lexicon, born from his sustained decision to eschew paint in favor of paper. Beginning with end papers and later incorporating advertising paper reclaimed from the streets of Los Angeles, his work moves fluidly between the social and the referential, the everyday and the art historical. Across heavily worked surfaces built up layer by layer, then collapsed and reconstituted, allusions to mythology, theology, and history recur.
