The Modern showcases abstract works in exhibit ‘Mark Bradford: End Papers’

In beauty salons, end papers are used to make permanent waves for a Jheri curl, the glossy hairstyle that was popular among African Americans in the ’80s.

They protect hair from being overheated by curlers.

When he was growing up, Mark Bradford’s mother had a hair salon in South Los Angeles. Bradford sported a Jheri curl in the ’80s and without the money for paint supplies, he used the cheap translucent end papers, which were sold in small boxes by the thousand for less than a dollar, as the basis for his art.

Using these tissue-like papers as paint turned out to be quite the breakthrough for the artist, who is now famous for his grid-like abstract works that sometimes resemble city maps.

Bradford has received several awards and grants over the years and in 2018 one of his paintings, “Helter Skelter I,” sold for $12 million, the highest-ever auction price for a living African American artist.

Part painting and part collage, this 20-year survey of idiosyncratic abstract works peppered with personal and social references, “Mark Bradford: End Papers,” is on view from March 8 to August 9 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

“I had this desire to try to connect where I was from with where I was going,” Bradford said. “But I didn’t want to be explicit and I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to reveal, so I wanted the material to speak for me.”

Bradford’s take on abstract painting is different from the “white male cowboy art,” as he puts it. Artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning developed abstract expressionism in New York in the ’40s and are often role models for abstract artists. But with a height of 6-foot-8, Bradford is every bit as macho as those hard-drinking, self-destructive painters. And instead of turning away from the world and painting with an internalized dialogue, Bradford’s gaze is outward.

He also cites the work of a female minimalist abstract painter, Agnes Martin, as one of his main influences and it shows in some of his earliest paintings.

“I have been in the art world for over forty years and visited many studios,” said Michael Auping, the Modern’s former chief curator who organized this exhibit. “I had never had a male artist tell me he was influenced by a female artist. Not once.”

The unstable grids of the paintings in the first gallery are dense and as tight as hair curlers. But they started loosening up within a couple years and began to resemble landscapes, which is referenced in titles like, “20 minutes from any bus stop.” Bradford also started looking at images on Google Maps for inspiration.

“I increasingly started backing out of the hair salon,” Bradford said. “I grew up in one, but I am not comfortable building a career out of talking about black women’s private spaces. So I started walking around and turned my gaze to little details that point to conversations other than the obvious larger meta hip-hop narratives.”

Bradford is more interested in class, immigration, and gender roles in South Los Angeles. He examined these themes by using chopped up fragments of billboards, merchant posters, and magazines as other common materials that sporadically appear in his paintings.

The grids start to fall apart as Bradford’s work evolved and he began focusing more on looking at landscapes as abstract paintings. He started using a printer to make fake end papers as material. But works like “The hood is moody” are still conceptual representations of his immediate surroundings.

From 2004, “Los Moscos” is a complete departure from Bradford’s end paper paintings, and it is one of the most spectacular works exhibited in this show. With a dark background that looks like an overhead view of a city from an airplane at night, colorful chopped ad fragments seem to explode across the surface of the painting.

“I really started becoming interested in the demographics of the city,” Bradford said. “Especially the invisible economies and invisible stories and public land being used in a very different way. I wanted to show this explosion and intensity and make it dark. It’s about shadow economies and things that navigate outside of systems, an invasion.”

“It’s similar to my work as a painter,” he continues. “There’s this idea of a modernist painter being a pure thing. People say I do mixed media, but no I’m a painter. I just like the idea of my work being stained, less pure, and more mixed up. I don’t have to use paint.”