Katherine Bernhardt:

Neonfarbblendluminanzwuchtgemaeldenetzhautkollisionsgefahr

24.9.2026–10.1.2027

Bernhardt’s pictorial worlds are shaped by globally circulating visual systems: comics, cartoons, advertising, fashion, and digital media intersect with motifs drawn from everyday life and consumer culture. Characters such as Pink Panther, Garfield, Pac-Man, or figures from the Pokémon universe encounter sneakers, Crocs, cigarettes, mushrooms, or toilet paper rolls. In seemingly spontaneous constellations, the artist combines motifs that appear unrelated at first glance, creating visual spaces that are at once humorous and unsettling.

Executed directly with spray paint and acrylic on canvas, Bernhardt’s works reject perspective, illusion, and atmospheric depth. Instead, they unfold as open pictorial fields in which pop aesthetics, consumer culture, and personal associations overlap. The repeated use of certain figures and objects simultaneously evokes serial image production and strategies of Appropriation Art. Yet Bernhardt continually subverts any rigid system through her intuitive and almost improvisational compositions.

Balancing irony, sensory overload, and playful lightness, her works generate a distinctive ambivalence: familiar consumer images shift into the surreal, while humorous motifs acquire an underlying darker tone. Each painting appears as a self-contained visual thought that sets off a chain of free associations.

The exhibition presents a selection of key works from recent years and offers insight into Bernhardt’s unmistakable visual language through a carefully conceived exhibition parcours. It provides a comprehensive perspective on an artist whose work combines the expressive freedom of painting with the visual codes of global popular culture.

Curated by Sandro Droschl