Cerberus, the “hound of Hades,” is the three-headed dog that guards the Underworld and keeps the dead from leaving. The existentially eloquent new paintings that comprise Mark Bradford’s spectacular exhibition, “Cerberus,” seem to look beyond the dog and into the mouth of a deep and dematerializing space. “I have always been interested in pulling the world that exists beyond the studio walls, and outside the art world, into the work,” Mark Bradford has said. Now, through pigmented strata, lacerated and stripped, he’s pulled the Underworld into “the work.” —E.C.