Washington’s City Paper had this news just before the rest of the world:
Mark Bradford, a rapidly rising Los Angeles artist known for his evocative, often apocalyptic abstract paintings, will bring an enormous site-specific installation to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. For a solo show coming to the museum in November 2016, Bradford will create a painting that occupies the entire circumference of the building’s second-floor inner galleries. At 397 linear feet of wall space, the commission will be a monumental undertaking for both the artist and the museum. The painter will be working without any intercessory support—no canvas, no paper—applying materials directly to the museum’s walls. While other shows have put the museum’s cylindrical galleries to work—from Andy Warhol and Hiroshi Sugimoto to Douglas Gordon and Anselm Kiefer—this is the first time an artist will tap the museum’s entire second floor for a single project. […]
He says that the Hirshhorn piece will likely be another “pull painting,” a technique developed by the artist that involves building up layers of colored paper and then sanding, cutting, peeling, and stripping away material to reveal a wall drawing. (MATRIX 172, a 2015 project pictured above, provides an example.)
“It’s not about fetishizing the brush movement on the canvas,” Bradford says. “It’s more like pulling a tugboat across the surface.”
The Hirshhorn Commissions L.A.’s Mark Bradford for an Epic 360-Degree Fresco (City Paper)
