Katherine Bernhardt

Katherine Bernhardt’s (b. 1975, St. Louis, MO) boundless visual appetite has established her as one of the most energetic painters working today. She first attracted notice in the early 2000s for her paintings of supermodels taken straight from the pages of fashion magazines such as Elle and Vogue. In the decade following, she began making pattern paintings that feature an ever-expanding list of quotidian motifs. Tacos, coffee makers, toilet paper, cigarettes, mushrooms, E.T., Garfield, Darth Vader, and the Pink Panther make unlikely visual combinations within expansive fields of exuberant color. Through her index of images, Bernhardt chronicles her life and the broader culture, taking pleasure in variety and fully investigating each of her obsessions before moving to another. Her trust in the fundamental underpinnings of painting gives her the freedom to depict anything she wants, and the democratizing surfaces of her canvases work without illusion, perspective, logical scale shifts, or atmosphere.