Katherine Bradford

Katherine Bradford (Houston, 1942) is a New York based painter.
Bradford is conceived as one of the most important positions of contemporary American painting , having made a breakthrough with her own very personal approach in the USA. Initially working abstractly, she gradually found her way to the figurative; from superheroes to swimmers and larger-than-life bodies made up of color fields. Bradford is interested in communities and their interactions, without however neglecting the individual and the personal. She advocates diversity and the overcoming of traditional borders of race, class, and gender. The bodies she paints are all similarly ubiquitous templates into which viewers can project themselves. Narratives are very evident but also interrupted, resisting to become too explicit, remaining allusive and ultimately mysterious. Movement and space are key, but strangely restricted to the painting and the canvas. The artist creates an idiosyncratic admixture of figuration and abstraction that lies in a reduction of the depicted motifs, while nonetheless — or rather thus — grasping the essence. Finally, Bradford’s use of light is special, as she makes her figures shine out. In her striking works over many decades, Bradford has been developing a very personal ongoing story about and through painting, which she retells with ever new variations. In recent years she has taken this to an unprecedented level of the interplay of form, color, and light with ​“her” mysteriously present bodies. The presentations of these strange, present, and self-determined bodies in their highly expressive positions — standing, sitting, lying or suspended, — leads to an astounding focus on something very essential.

She won in 2021 the Rappaport Prize and she received a Guggenheim Award in 2010, a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 2011 as well as two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2017-2018 she was Senior Critic on the faculty of the Yale School of Art, New Haven.Her work is included in collections such as the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Bates College Museum, the Bowdoin College Museum,the Brooklyn Museum, the Collection of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College,The Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College(Orlando) ,the Museum of Art ( TX), Farnsworth Museum (ME).

Katherine Bradford has had several solo exhibitions including the most recent one at Kaufmann Repetto, Milan (2024) ; Sky Swimmers at Kunsthalle Emden, Emden (2024); American Odyssey, curated by Sandro Droschl at Halle für Kunst Graz, Graz (2024);Night Swimmers at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo(2024);Fear of Shoes at Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg (2023), at Portland Museum of Art (2022) and at The Modern Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (2013); at Aucocisco Galleries, Portland ME (2011) ; at John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY(2010); a the University of Maine Museum, Bangor, ME(2008); at Edward Thorp Gallery, New York (2007).

She also participated in group shows at Pilar Corrias, London (2024); Farnsworth Art Museum (2023); Kunsthaus Nürnberg (2023); Queretaro Contemporary Art Museum, Mexico City (2023); XIAO Museum of Contemporary Art ( 2022); the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, New York (2020); Crystal Bridges Museum, Arkansas (2019); the Nerman Museum, Kansas (2019); the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, as part of the fourth Prospect New Orleans Triennia (2017); MoMA P.S.1, New York (2007) and at the Brooklyn Museum, New York (1997).