'What are you doing in here' (2018) is a consummate example of Mark Bradford's distinctive visual lexicon, born from his sustained decision to eschew paint in favour of paper. Beginning with end papers and later incorporating advertising paper reclaimed from the streets of Los Angeles, his work moves fluidly between the social and the referential, the everyday and the art historical. Across heavily worked surfaces built up layer by layer, then collapsed and reconstituted, allusions to mythology, theology, and history recur.

This work was executed at a pivotal moment in the artist’s career. In 2017, he garnered international acclaim for his exhibition at the US Pavilion in the Venice Biennale, and unveiled a monumental commission at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. Related works from this era are held in esteemed museum collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

Bradford has explored the visual language of comic books for over a decade, drawn to the medium’s emotional register and formal possibilities. Here, comics are layered among material strata to form the intricate surface of ‘What are you doing in here’, where printed panels and speech bubbles peak out from beneath a density of pigment and paper. The text of one speech bubble lends the work its title.

Abrasions and lacerations across the painting's surface create a network of lines that alternately resemble fissures, infrastructural grids, or branching systems allusions to both the natural world and man-made structures, evoking arterial veins, spider webs and neighbourhood streets. These gestures resonate with Bradford’s ongoing practice of mapping and counter-mapping, which meditates upon the role of place, movement, and power across social space.

By embedding the materials of public life into his compositions, Bradford extends the traditional language of painting to pursue a distinctive approach to abstraction. Mirroring the process of archaeological excavation, his surfaces function as sites of accumulation, where fragments of the tangible world are compressed, disrupted, and reconfigured to reveal the material conditions from which they emerged.