We are pleased to announce that Thievery by Servants (2013) by Mark Bradford is now on view on the fifth floor of the New York gallery through April 4, 2026.

Monumental in scale, Thievery by Servants comprises 50 panels across nearly 30 feet—in a bold interplay of paper, text, and color that demonstrates the artist’s provocative repositioning of abstraction in the twenty-first century. The work is a crucial example of Bradford’s Merchant Poster series, initiated circa 2005. In this body of work, Bradford repurposes a particular form of local advertisement—collected from the streets of his neighborhood in South Los Angeles—that promotes among other things, small business offerings, quick cash, legal services, and housing. He sources these materials, which take the forms of billboards, flyers, newsprint, posters, and handmade signs, and reflect the specific needs of local communities, from the windows of small shops, fences, telephone poles, and wood scaffolding.

Layering such posters and other found papers in his studio, Bradford creates dense surfaces that are carved into and sanded down, exposing underlying strata and textural relationships. In the resulting works, the surface text often becomes intentionally obfuscated, allowing other material traces to come to the foreground and the ephemeral nature of shifting social currents.

(1-3) Installation views of Thievery by Servants, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York, 2026. © Mark Bradford. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.