Hair salon, death drop and hurricane: How Mark Bradford keeps abstraction tethered to life

Mark Bradford's "Float" (2019/2025) is a vast, undulating field of cloth strips laid out across the 600-square-meter gallery floor of the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul. It serves as a prelude to "Keep Walking," American artist's first exhibition in Korea. Courtesy of Amorepacific Museum of Art

Sprawled across the 600-square-meter gallery floor of the Amorepacific Museum of Art is a vast, undulating field of cloth strips. Step closer, and the kaleidoscopic surface reveals each strip’s crude urban origins: weathered posters, canvas scraps, torn flyers and newspapers — all stitched and knotted together with coarse hemp rope.

Rather than having to observe this curious patchwork from behind a cordon, viewers are invited to walk directly over its bright, breathing surface as much as they like.

But the path is far from smooth. Cloth curls into tangled ridges here and there, and ropes snag your feet. One careless stride, and you’re down in a slapstick stumble. Every movement demands focus, with your gaze fixed on the terrain underfoot.

The simple act of walking thus becomes a slow, deliberate choreography — attuned not only to your sense of balance, but to the material memory unfolding beneath your feet, made from the city’s everyday detritus, now stitched into something monumental.

Such is the tactile and inevitably political experience that Mark Bradford’s “Float” offers.

In Mark Bradford's "Float," cloth curls into tangled ridges, and ropes snag your feet. One careless stride, and you're down in a slapstick stumble. Every movement therefore demands focus, with your gaze fixed on the terrain underfoot. Newsis

As a “walkable” painting, lifted off the wall and spilling across the floor, it challenges conventions of how art is displayed and perceived within the insulated space of a museum. It demands a physical, almost confrontational encounter with the weight and texture of its raw materials, often salvaged from the streets of his Los Angeles neighborhood.

Los Angeles-born abstractionist Mark Bradford / Newsis

“I’m questioning what makes a painting, the hierarchy of painting, the purity of painting,” the 63-year-old artist said at the Seoul museum, where “Float” serves as a prelude to his first exhibition in Korea titled “Keep Walking.”

This questioning has been central to the painter’s practice. As a Black, queer artist working in abstraction — a nonrepresentational art form long dominated by white, Euro-American men — he both embraces and subverts the genre.

Where abstraction has often been framed as inward-looking and divorced from politics, Bradford pulls it back to earth. He anchors it in the mess of lived experience: race, gender, inequality, gentrification, the memory of the AIDS crisis and the enduring violence of systemic oppression.

To construct his own visual language, he scours the debris of city life such as ad posters, beauty salon end papers, street maps and bureaucratic forms — fragments that carry the real weight of history, labor and survival.

“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. And at the end of it, it becomes something my own,” he noted. “I consider it abstract art with social memory, social history.”

That tether to his own lived reality was never something he could let go. “I had lived so much history before I started art school [at age 30]. And when I finished my studies, I didn’t want to separate or rewrite myself. I wanted to bring some of my history into my work and then add other conversations about art history, too.”

It was this insistence on bringing social narrative into abstraction that would ultimately define his rise. In 2017, Bradford carried that sensibility to the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where he cemented his status as one of the country’s most vital living painters.

Mark Bradford's "The Betrayal of a Belief" (2024), part of his long-running "End Paper" series / Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

In “Keep Walking,” that vision pulses through every corner.

Nowhere is it more tangible than in his long-running “End Paper” series. Instead of paint, the artist layers the translucent end papers normally used to protect hair during chemical perms — the same kind his mother used in her beauty salon, where he spent much of his boyhood. The sheets are singed along the edges with a torch, then pressed into rhythmic grids.

Over time, the series has expanded to absorb more elements from the salon world: hair dye, magazine clippings, the everyday ephemera of beauty work. Each composition becomes a quiet archive, where personal memory and the broader politics of race and labor merge into an abstract language of his own.

Mark Bradford's "Death Drop" (2023) / Newsis

Lying among these flat canvas works is a striking outlier: “Death Drop,” Bradford’s rare venture into figuration.

The larger-than-life sculpture, modeled on the artist’s own body, lies prone on the floor, with arms flung wide, one leg bent sharply at the knee.

The posture suggests violent collapse, but the title reframes the fall. In LGBTQ+ ballroom culture, a “death drop” is a dramatic flourish — a sudden, theatrical descent into stillness, followed by the rise.

His figure embodies that duality, conjuring both the ecstatic climax of queer nightlife and the devastating toll of the AIDS crisis. It’s as if the body is performing and dying all at once.

“The sculpture came out of my relationship to ballroom culture, but at the same time, my relationship to the violence of the AIDS epidemic [during my youth],” he said. “I really don’t like using my body, but for this one, there was no escaping it. Violence is sometimes so nonabstract, and for this, I didn’t want to use anyone else’s but my own.”

Installation view of "Keep Walking" at the Amorepacific Museum of Art / Courtesy of Amorepacific Museum of Art

Its placement alongside the “End Paper” series highlights a moment still seared into his memory, when he first learned of a world-shifting virus as a teeanger in his mother’s salon.

“I was 18,” he recalled. “There was a man who went from hair salon to hair salon, telling us that there was something killing men. I will never forget that moment. So for me, that social memory is very much tied to the memory of the rise of HIV.”

Even though it was made as recently as 2023, Bradford told The Korea Times that Seoul will likely be the sculpture’s final outing.

“I think this is it. I don’t think I’ll show it anymore,” he said after a thought. “It did what it needed to do. Once it goes in the box, it’s done.”

Mark Bradford's "Here Comes the Hurricane" (2025) / Courtesy of Amorepacific Museum of Art

“Death Drop” may be the most overtly figurative work here, but the tension it evokes ripples throughout the exhibition.

“Here Comes the Hurricane” is a new series made specifically for the Seoul show. The “hurricane,” he explains, is a metaphor for an uncontrollable force, both natural disaster and social reckoning.

The room hums with palpably dense surfaces: oxidized textures, bursts of color suggestive of flood, fire and wind. Here, different histories of marginalization converge — the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the defiant legacy of William Dorsey Swann, the formerly enslaved man who became the first known self-proclaimed drag queen in American history.

“I almost wanted to create my own ballroom in a way, where there is the potential for something new to happen,” he said.

And all he asks of us, in the world he’s shaped through abstraction, is to keep walking — through the storm, across shifting patchwork, toward whatever comes next.

Because in the end, it’s the act of moving forward that carries us through.

“Keep Walking” runs through Jan. 25, 2026, at the Amorepacific Museum of Art.

Installation view of "Keep Walking" at the Amorepacific Museum of Art / Courtesy of Amorepacific Museum of Art