Shade: Clyfford Still / Mark Bradford

Shade: Clyfford Still / Mark Bradford features the work of celebrated American artists Mark Bradford (born 1961) and Clyfford Still (1904–1980). For the exhibition, Bradford has helped select more than twenty paintings from the Albright-Knox's important collection of works by Still. In adjacent galleries, Bradford presents a group of his own paintings—created specifically for this exhibition—that manifest an ongoing conversation with both Still’s abstractions and the broader legacy of Abstract Expressionism.

Bradford has long been fascinated by Still’s extensive use of black as a signature component of his abstract imagery and the many statements he made about the color. Still famously asserted that his own dramatic canvases, which he once called “black suns,” could even be hung in darkness because “they will carry their own fire.” “Black,” he proclaimed, “was never a color of death or terror for me. I think of it as warm—and generative. But color is what you choose to make it.” Such affirmative references to blackness were unparalleled in a 1950s America riven by the early rumblings of the Civil Rights movement and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. As an African American abstract painter, Bradford chooses to read Still’s relationship with black as an open-minded invitation to dialogue.

Bradford's new paintings continue his own exploration of abstraction’s power to address social and political concerns. Bradford has recently stated, “I think there are other ways of looking through abstraction. To use the whole social fabric of our society as a point of departure for abstraction reanimates it, dusts it off. I just find that chilling and amazing.” In this, Bradford finds Still a powerful inspiration. “Shade” suggests the power of intergenerational dialogue to cast a canonical moment in American art history in a different light. Bradford is reading Abstract Expressionism against the grain in order to enrich his practice and, profoundly, to color our own view of abstraction.

In 1959, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (then the Albright Art Gallery) presented the first large-scale survey exhibition of Clyfford Still’s career; it included seventy-two paintings dating from 1936 to 1957. In 1964, Still gave the museum thirty-one paintings. This donation joined two works already in the museum’s collection, bringing the number of his works in Buffalo to thirty-three. Today, the Albright-Knox is the largest repository of the artist’s work outside the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver.