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 humankind at Kaufmann Repetto in Milan (2024) ; Sky Swimmers at Kunsthalle Emden in Emden (2024); American Odyssey, curated by Sandro Droschl at Halle für Kunst Graz in Graz (2024);Night Swimmers at Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo(2024);Fear of Shoes at Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg (2023), Les saltimbanques at Campoli Presti in Paris (2023); Flying Woman: The paintings of Katherine Bradfordat Portland Museum of Art in Portland (2022); Focus : Katherine Bradford at The Modern Museum of Fort Worth (201Y); at Aucocisco Galleries in Portland (2011) ; at John Davis Gallery in Hudson(2010); at the University of Maine Museum in Bangor (2008); at Edward Thorp Gallery in New York (2007).

She also participated in group shows such as Conversation Galante at Pilar Corrias in London (2024); Sunrise Sunset at Sommer Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv (2024); Cultural Olympiad at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in Paris (2024); The Summer Games at KMAC Museum in Louisville (2024); The Swimmer at The FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea (2024); As Told by It’s Makers: Recent Acquisitions of Contemporary Art at the National Academy of Design in New York (2024);
The Farnsworth at 75 at Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland (2023); Who's Afraid of Stardust? Positionen queerer Gegenwartskunst at Kunsthaus Nürnberg in Nüremberg (2023); The Day I Saw You: Portraits from Fundación AMMA at Queretaro Contemporary Art Museum in Mexico City (2023); at XIAO Museum of Contemporary Art ( 2022); Never Done, 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond at Tang Museum at Skidmore in Saratoga Springs, NY (2020); Men of Steel, Women of Wonder at Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas (2019); Pulse at the the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas (2019); the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, as part of the fourth Prospect New Orleans Triennia (2017);Orpheus Selection at P.S.1 MoMA in New York (2007);Current Undercurrent, Working in Brooklyn and at the Brooklyn Museum in New York (1997).