Mark Bradford, Los Moscos 2004. Tate. © Mark Bradford.
12 rooms in Media Networks
These artworks raise questions about consumerism, identity, and the power of mass media
This room features works from two artists that draw from print culture – particularly advertisements – surrounding their lives. Mark Bradford’s Los Moscos is a large-scale collage that includes torn bits of posters, flyers and papers the artist found in the streets around his studio in Los Angeles. He arranged the elements into an abstract composition, which resembles an aerial view of a city at night. Fragments of the original advertising texts are still visible and speak to the diversity of people and ideas resonating across neighbourhoods.
Andy Warhol produced a series of black and white screenprinted paintings called ‘Ads and Illustrations’ in the mid-1980s. He based them on newspaper and magazine advertisements which he traced by hand and screenprinted onto canvas. Warhol was a well-known fashion illustrator in New York in the 1950s before becoming the artist most associated with Pop Art in the 1960s. These late paintings reflect Warhol’s interest in looking at consumer culture, particularly images of war, religious signs, and advertisements for fast food.
Andy Warhol, Christ $9.98 (negative and positive) 1985–6
1/2
artworks in Andy Warhol and Mark Bradford
Mark Bradford, Los Moscos 2004
This large-scale collage includes materials found by the artist on the streets around his studio in Los Angeles, USA. Visually suggestive of aerial maps of sprawling, urban areas, the collage is constructed entirely from paper fragments which, the artist believes, ‘act as memory of things pasted and things past. You can peel away the layers of papers and it’s like reading the streets through the signs’. The work takes its title from a derogatory slang term for migrant day labourers in the San Francisco Bay Area, reflecting the artist’s long-standing interest in the sub-cultures of the inner city.
Gallery label, October 2016
2/2
artworks in Andy Warhol and Mark Bradford
Art in this room