Introduction

HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark is delighted to host Katherine Bradford’s first comprehensive institutional exhibition in Europe. Bradford is considered one of the most important positions in contemporary US American painting. The exhibition will present fifteen crucial works of the last decade from collections in New York and the US East Coast, as well as a cycle of twenty-three new paintings, which the artist has produced especially for the exhibition. In her striking works, Bradford (born 1942 in New York, lives in Brooklyn and Maine) has been developing a very personal ongoing story of painting over many decades, which she tells and retells with ever new variations. In recent years, she has taken this to an unprecedented level in terms of the interplay of form, color, and light, and with the mysterious presence of her figures. Her depictions of these strange, self-determined bodies in their highly expressive positions standing, sitting, lying or suspended, leads to an astounding focus on something very essential. Even after her very long and eventful American Odyssey, the artist remains positive about humanity — and she invites us to share the sentiment. In complex times such as ours, Bradford’s art stands for a vibrant and yet inherently critical humanism.
Painting remains the medium of art, and of its crises. It remains the medium best suited to identifying the cyclical development of interest in art and the evolutions of art business and markets. Interestingly, in the past decade, a prominent number of mainly US women artists have come to the fore of a new interest in painting, gradually taking over from their male colleagues who have dominated the scene for so long. A conspicuous number of these women artists, — including Judith Bernstein, Mary Heilmann, Rebecca Morris or Amy Sillman — many of whom are important influences for Bradford, have only in recent years received recognition for their ground-breaking contributions to painting. Some of these artists were only able to witness their own international acclaim at the very ends of their lives, while others such as Lee Lozano, Joyce Pensato, Rose Wylie and also Maria Lassnig, whose New York period was key for her painting, were no longer able to experience it. Their influence is also evident in the work of a younger generation of artists like Ana Benaroya, Katherine Bernhardt, Nicole Eisenman and Christine De Miguel.
This influential group of artists, coming mostly from New York and Los Angeles, was fundamental to Katherine Bradford’s own American Odyssey. Relocating from Maine to New York City, she became part of an artistic community where she developed the very personal approach to image-making that in recent years led to breakthroughs, first in the US, and now internationally — at the age of 81. The casual and self-confident character of her recent works were preceded by a long, personal search for her position in the field of painting. Initially working abstractly, she gradually found her way to the figurative; the superheroes, swimmers and larger-than-life bodies that populate her later work. 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 suggested but also interrupted; they resist becoming explicit, remaining allusive and ultimately mysterious. Movement and space are key, but strangely restricted by her compositions. The artist creates an idiosyncratic admixture of figuration and abstraction that lies in a reduction of her chosen motifs, while nonetheless — or rather thus — grasping their essence.
In technical terms, Bradford moved some time ago from oils to acrylics to support her particular attention to color and substance; a choice which emphasizes her skillful executions of line, surface and shading. Often noted by critics is Bradford’s handling of light, as her figures and landscapes appear to glow from within.
Painting can do all this if the painter can. Katherine Bradford doesn’t ​“just do it,” she does it ​“day after day.”