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Power 100

Most influential people in 2025 in the contemporary artworld

12

Mark Bradford

Artist - Pedagogic practician pushing neighbourhood aesthetics

12 in 2025

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Photo: Sean Shim-Boyle. © Mark Bradford. Courtesy Mark Bradford and Hauser & Wirth

‘I take things that exist in the world. I take them to my studio. I close the door, then I have a fight with art history,’ the painter told Korea Times as he opened Keep Walking at Seoul’s Amorepacific Museum of Art, his largest exhibition to date in Asia (travelling from Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof and before going on to Kunstmuseum Bern). Bradford was referring to his habit of picking up detritus from the street to use in his largescale works: scraps of flyposter, street maps, administrative forms, restaurant flyers and the ‘end papers’ used in the chemical dyeing of hair at beauty salons, which end up intermingled with his paint. The other thing he takes back into the studio however is the messy, often problematic world outside, his paintings and floor work obliquely engaging with race and queerness and political maleficence. Respite, however, comes in the form of Art + Practice, the social enterprise he founded in South Los Angeles to bring art to the local community through its museum, while providing educational and career support for young people in foster care as they reach adult age and transition out of the system.

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