The Brooklyn Rail

Mark Bradford reveals the cyclical nature of violence and racial injustice, as prevalent today as during the Great Migration era one-hundred years ago in America. On view at the Hamburger Bahnhof’s National Gallery of Contemporary Art through May 18, 2025, the artist’s first German solo exhibition, Keep Walking, marks the reopening of the historic Rieckhallen in Berlin. Featured here are nineteen of his works created over two decades, including paintings, sculptures, installations, and videos.

Though abstract, Bradford’s work makes a strong sociopolitical statement about blackness in an urban landscape. A Los Angeles native, the artist draws on his personal experience with race and gender identity, oppression, and resilience, and intimately depicts the lives of Black Americans. His works include memorabilia and everyday materials like newspaper clippings and posters, many of them sourced locally from Southern California.

It is fitting that the setting for his exhibits is Hamburger Bahnhof, a converted train station. Bradford’s work and the station both bear witness to the constant flux of arrivals and departures, with their expectancy and disappointment, hope and despair tied to these movements. Even the floor of the exhibition area is carpeted with parallel horizontal lines, the black ones resembling railway tracks. The impact in Bradford’s depiction is his understatement of highly emotive content in his muted abstractions—that is, until one takes a closer look and sees the human pain scratched in the details.

The exhibition begins with two large-scale canvases from the artist’s “Train Timetables” series, I Don’t Know What I Am (2024) and You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice (2023). These paintings depict the historical impact of the Great Migration—the movement of millions of Black Americans from the rural South to the urban North or West in search of opportunity and freedom. They capture the urgency and displacement that communities experienced in the 1920s in their layered charts from the era that mapped travel distances between railroad stations. The grid-like numbers and names of cities, etched into oxidized paper and caulk, emerge from a textured, abstract landscape that suggests bodies in motion. Using muted tones—gray and beige, black and white—the unseen subjects’ journeys involved a high emotional toll with the inevitability of violence in their search for liberation. Bradford compares the physical trajectories of Black Americans to the social disparities that exist today, the paintings reminding audiences that movement is, above all, a double-edged sword: for some, a path toward opportunity, for others, destruction. Bradford’s exploration of identity interlaces with narratives of race, sexuality, and displacement, challenging norms surrounding movement and belonging.

Spoiled Foot (2016) is another standout. Suspended from the ceiling, this gigantic pock-marked orb of red and black compels its viewers to negotiate their way around its edges, a feeling akin to being hemmed in and marginalized by a global entity that wields centralized power. Initially created for the 2017 Venice Biennale, where Bradford represented the U.S., the mixed-media work on canvas, lumber, drywall, and Luan plywood reveals the artist’s distinctive use of quotidian materials to create a work of monumental consequence. The title evokes the weary path worn by generations of laborers, symbolizing the physical, economic, and the broader socioeconomic disenfranchisement Black Americans have long faced. Though the sculpture’s aesthetic points to the decay and neglect of the inner city, a sense of resilience also emerges, echoing the artist’s exploration of class and segregation, particularly as they relate to physical movement.

Then there’s the renowned video installation Niagara (2005), where Bradford follows Melvin, a young Black man, walking the streets of Los Angeles. Presented on a double-sided floating screen, the work forces audiences to confront the realities of city life and identity. The title is a nod to the 1953 film noir of the same name—only in Bradford’s work, we don’t see Marilyn Monroe. This time, it’s Melvin moving through a neighborhood marked by economic hardship. This stride then turns into a bounce—an act of defiance, if you will—to evoke an uneasy negotiation with public space with its latent prejudice in pursuit of autonomy.

Bradford discloses that the Keep Walking encourages a dialogue not only with his own body, but with the viewer experiencing the show. This is apparent in Pinocchio is on Fire (2010), an immersive three-part installation that occupies two full galleries. The work features blacked-out newsprint and linoleum tiles reminiscent of 1980s beauty parlors; the strains of Nancy Wilson’s song “Tell Me the Truth” play throughout the spaces. Bradford alters vinyl record covers by fusing his own posters with original album work, merging public and personal identities to emphasize the media’s role in constructing and distorting Black male representation.

The installation’s most striking element is a long, narrow tunnel lined with illegible sheets of newsprint, their content obscured by layers of black ink that symbolize the blurring of Black male sexuality and identity. This deliberate act of erasure challenges the role of the print media, raising questions about how reality is construed, while the unfinished wooden walls on the outside of the tunnel, resembling the backlot of a movie set, point to the artificiality of these narratives. The altered vinyl record sleeves stand as elegies of a community’s resilience amidst loss, where each crack and fusion in the material testifies to lives both celebrated and mourned. In this, there is direct reference to R&B singer Teddy Pendergrass, whose image as a paragon of Black masculinity was shattered after a car accident and subsequent rumors surrounding his sexuality.

By confronting these reductive representations, Bradford’s works dismantle traditional hierarchies of space and representation, situating bodies both within and in constant dialogue with environments that are both nurturing and hostile. The Keep Walking exhibition speaks to these themes and to the paradoxical nature of movement and bodily existence—a path toward liberation, yet fraught with danger.