Hall 4 [19-20]

In this room, Katherine Bradford continues to use depictions of bodies to negotiate questions of community and the positioning of the individual in society. With formal inventiveness and shifting ground, Bradford always lends her figures a narrative weight. The artist shows once again that individual and society are mutually dependent from each other. Her exploration of groups of people traversing physical space together demonstrates a remarkable sensibility in terms of negociations of social structures.
The predominant colors of the two works exhibited here are pink, dark and light blue, purple and red. In Sideway Swimmers (2019) [19], the various bodies appear to be layered on top of each other, or due to the shifted perspective, perhaps floating through space. The figures created by Bradford do not always take the boundaries of the canvas seriously, but rather drift over them. While two of the bodies are apparently naked and their faces have almost no features, the man dressed in the suit has slightly suggested facial features and seems to glide or float over the lower body. In this regard, Bradford shows a parallelism of individuals in communities and society, referring to the different ways in which various individuals occupy and share physical space.
Fever (2021) [20] illustrates a reclining body touched by a hand, and a smaller body, supposedly a child, kneeling next to it. Again, perspective is manipulated. A chimera-like body painted in pink, supported by two coarse and large hands, is reminiscent of bodies melting into their surroundings like in the mystical paintings of the Swiss artist Miriam Cahn, who often illustrates the fragility and vulnerability of people, regardless of their gender. Fever is a response to the Covid-19 crisis. The cryptic and elusive elements of this work bear witness to the devastation of the pandemic in the US, which was particularly widespread and cost the lives of more than a million people. Not only were friends and relatives lost, but left behind were also empty spaces that cannot be revised.
 

[19]
Sideway Swimmers, 2019
Acrylic on canvas
172,7 x 203,2 cm
Courtesy Susan & Michael Hort, New York
 

[20]
Fever, 2021
Acrylic on canvas
203,2 x 147,3 cm
Courtesy Rachel & Jonathan Wilf, New Jersey