Mark Bradford at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai

The Rockbund Art Museum present ‘Tears of a Tree', the first major museum exhibition in Asia by Mark Bradford. The artist has created three large-scale collage paintings specifically for the exhibition. Measuring 12 metres each in length, and consisting of four panels, The Tears of a Tree (2014), Falling Horses (2014) and Lazy Mountain (2014) were all inspired by the time the artist spent in Shanghai.

Coming across old colonial maps of Shanghai at a local market, Bradford became interested in the partitioning of the city during the international zone period, the changes to the Chinese address system under the imposed Japanese system, as well as the pre-industrialisation landscape of the city—in other words, the mapping and remapping of the city, and the molding and remolding of the physical landscape over many decades. The paintings are informed by this context, and the massive change in the urban landscape that the artist witnessed during his visits.

The exhibition will also include a group of new sculptures titled ‘The Loop of Deep Waters’. Suspended on the fifth-floor gallery, the buoy-shaped forms are made up of Bradford’s signature materials—paper, caulking agents and cords.