Artist and director’s tour
Katherine Bradford, Sandro Droschl 

The guided tour with Katherine Bradford and Sandro Droschl will offer an in-depth insight into the artist’s work and her recently opened exhibition American Odyssey.

In Katherine Bradford’s first extensive institutional exhibition in Europe, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark shows fifteen works by the artist from the last decade, with a major focus on the collections in New York, as well as twenty-three new paintings produced especially for this exhibition. Katherine Bradford is widely considered one of the most remarkable positions in contemporary American painting, her practice can be connected to a current rise of interest in painting, and particularly the practices of female and queer artists.

In Bradford’s large-format paintings, abstraction and figuration merge. In the tradition of abstract expressionism, areas of color mutate into larger-than-life figures whose facial features are only partially sketched, if not completely missing. Often gender-ambiguous, these figures exemplify the artist’s considerable interest in diverse communities transcending boundaries of race, gender and class. There is a humanism in Bradford’s work that, in turbulent times like ours, reflects the political in a profoundly democratic way, in the sense of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the ​‘in-between people’, and can be understood as a counter-visuality against current conservative tendencies.

​The guided tour at HALLE FÜR KUNST will start at 11am.