Celia White reviews the exhibition Mark Bradford: Through Darkest America by Truck and Tank at White Cube, London, on view through January 12, 2014.

White writes that Bradford employs "a creative practice that, while not necessarily innovative, he has made his own, both technically and conceptually. Collage’s history is short but intense, and Bradford’s use of found materials such as posters and newsprint has its origins in Cubism: in the early 1910s, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris had likewise used found matter to play around with language and space, often with implied political and social commentary built in. At the same time, Bradford’s works in this show are reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg’s mixed media pieces, made in the 1950s and 60s, that incorporated signage, billboards and other metropolitan detritus into fine art to indicate that the best way to represent urban experience is to make work from its material manifestations…They set themselves aside from their precedents in the history of collage by virtue of their scale and of their combination of an additive and subtractive technique."