"The Once and Future King", 2011.
Knife with metal blade embedded in stone.
Mark Bradford is considered one of the most critically acclaimed artists of the latest generation, having represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2017. Unlike other African American artists who have favored a return to figurative language, Bradford has remained faithful to abstraction, creating paintings in which collage, in a process of applying superimposed layers of pigmented paper glued to canvas and then deliberately scratched and deteriorated, largely replaces painting. His work of great formal, material, and conceptual complexity focuses on themes of racial denunciation and sexual identity and explores the social and political structures that commodify marginalized communities and vulnerable populations. This sculpture The Once and Future King can be described as a portrait of power on the brink of failure and as a metaphor for art itself.