Katherine Bradford

Katherine Bradford (b. 1942, New York) paints enigmatic canvases that place characters, including mothers, superheroes, and swimmers, in abstract fields of saturated and sumptuous color. Her buoyant, luminous compositions feature dreamy and otherworldly settings such as outer space or the open sea. Bradford creates these galactic depths by laying down layer after layer of acrylic paint, rubbing or scraping it away, and going back in with a dry brush—techniques that create texture. Her surfaces therefore appear to glow — “many thin layers of paint [are] inflected [with] small glints of light,” as Bradford has described it.

Bradford’s subjects, which include isolated houses in addition to people in their underwear, often appear vulnerable and exposed. When describing her draw to the nighttime ocean as subject, Bradford explained that it had “everything a painter might need: endless mystery and lack of boundaries, hidden stories and dramatic light.” Steeped in narrative ambiguity, her canvases evoke a certain moody affect. Her figures appear somewhat awkward with economical faces and bodies. Interested in plunging the depths of “who we are, how we fit in…how [we] look and [are] with one another,” as the artist put it, she uses strategies of abstraction and androgyny to explore ideas of self and identity. Bradford’s paintings embrace unknowing, allowing the viewer to feel their way through painted expanses both fantastical and entirely familiar.

She has exhibited widely at institutions such as Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Graz, Austria; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; MoMA PS1, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AR; Prospect 4, New Orleans US Biennial, LA. Her work is included in collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Brooklyn Museum; Musee d’Art Moderne Paris; Portland Art Museum, Portland, ME; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Baltimore Museum of Art; and the Menil Collection, Houston TX. Her work has been shown at galleries including CANADA, Sperone Westwater, Pace Gallery, Anton Kern Gallery and David Zwirner in New York; Pilar Corrias in London, Campoli Presti in Paris; Haverkampf Liestenschneider Galerie, Berlin; Kaufman Repetto, Milan; and Tomio Koyama, Tokyo, Japan.

Bradford is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Joan Mitchell Grant. She has taught at institutions such as the Yale School of Art, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Monographs on the artist have been published by CANADA in 2018 and by JRP|Editions in 2024. In 2024 Bradford’s survey show “American Odyssey” was exhibited at Halle für Kunst Steiermark in Graz Austria.