Above: Mark Bradford, Taking Up the Cross, 2009. Below: Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 54, 1972. Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
On his week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast, artist Mark Bradford and I discuss his engagement with post-war abstract painting. Bradford told me that painter Richard Diebenkorn, whose studio was in Santa Monica, the Los Angeles suburb in which Bradford grew up, was a key influence. The influence Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings had on Bradford is especially clear in Bradford’s 2009 white-string-on-white pieces.
A mid-career survey of Bradford’s work is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (Also, a couple of large-scale works are installed across the street from SFMOMA, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.) The exhibition was curated for the Wexner Center for the Arts by Christopher Bedford in 2010. San Francisco is its final stop.
To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To download the program directly, click here (or click on the image). To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. You can stream the program and see images of the artworks Bradford and I discuss by clicking here.