Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Mark Bradford on view from January 17 – February 23, 2008. Entitled Nobody Jones, the show will be Bradford’s second solo-exhibition at the gallery.

The exhibition will feature Bradford’s signature collage work, as he continues his investigation of medium in various forms. Utilizing materials the artist finds on the streets around his Los Angeles studio, Bradford creates abstract works that can be seen as topographies of the city’s physical as well as social, economic, and cultural landscape.

Nobody Jones will include five large scale collage paintings. While abstract and dominated by silver surfaces, Bradford allows fragments of the materials he collages to show through, allowing the viewer seemingly familiar glimpses of the urban experience that inspire Bradford’s work.

The work James Brown is Dead will also be featured in the exhibition. For this work Bradford has taken a twenty foot long section of layered billboard posters and cut the words “James Brown is Dead” into the top layers. These layers are then pealed away, revealing the announcement.

The exhibition will also include sculptural pieces as well as several merchant posters, continuing a series of works in which the artist has taken posters from the streets of South Central Los Angeles advertising local services (DNA testing, auto repair, offers of cash for homes) and then elaborated their surfaces with his own style of collage and painting.

Mark Bradford was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, where he continues to live and work. He received both his BFA (1995) and his MFA (1997) from the California Institute for the Arts. He is the recipient of the Bucksbaum Award for his contribution to the Whitney biennial in 2006. Recent exhibitions include Neither New Nor Correct: New Work by Mark Bradford, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007); Eden’s Edge: Fifteen LA Artists, Hammer Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles (2007); and Street Level: Mark Bradford, William Cordova, Robin Rhode, Nasher Museum, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2007). Bradford’s work will also be shown at the New Museum in the exhibition Collage: The Unmonumental Picture from January 16 through March 23, 2008.