Mark Bradford’s first solo exhibition “Scorched Earth” at the Hammer Museum is a stunner and not in the typical ways one might expect. These paintings, engendered equally by the 1992 LA uprisings as well as the AIDS epidemic, constitute a visceral visual experience that seems at once highly personal but also universally relevant. An investigation into a painterly process is continued by Bradford’s imagery though deduced slowly through deliberately excavating and reconstituting the central image. Much like history evolves only to be redefined again and again according to the pulse of the times we live in, these paintings transmogrify and recapitulate their own historic moment.  

The Hammer Museum 
“Scorched Earth” Mark Bradford
10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90024
Show runs through Sept. 27, 2015