Mark Bradford grew up in 1970s South Los Angeles, where his mother rented a beauty salon near Leimert Park. He was six-foot-eight and his friends encouraged him to be a basketball player, but Bradford instead decided to apprentice at his mom’s shop. Against all odds, in 1997, he graduated with an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Bradford sold his first painting the year he turned 40 ($3,500!), and since then his grid-like abstract works—explorations of racism and poverty that combine paint, posters, newspaper clippings, and found objects—have sold like wildfire. In 2017, Bradford represented the U.S. at the Venice Biennale. In Berlin, this major solo show includes his monumental hanging sculpture, Spoiled Foot, first shown at the Biennale. —Elena Clavarino