Katherine Bernhardt
Neonfarbblendluminanzwucht
gemaeldenetzhautkollisionsgefahr

Katherine Bernhardt is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American art, whose expressive painting engage with globalized media and consumer culture. HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark is now presenting her first major institutional solo exhibition in Europe. Accompanied by a publication documents key works and offers unprecedented analysis of her œuvres. 

The title Neonfarbblendluminanzwuchtgemaeldenetzhautkollisionsgefahr is a German neologism that unites the elements essential to the concept and artistic approach into a single entity: neon – color – glare – luminance – force – painting – retina – collision – danger. As a gesture of linguistic overload and a condensation of a logic of sensory experience, the title refers to a body of work that directly targets perception, stimulus intensity, and visual superimposition. The juxtaposition of these terms generates a kind of continuous semantic current that translates the logic of her painting — characterized by the superimposition and proximity of signs, as well as by impulsive intensity and simultaneity — into a radically open language.

Bernhardt’s paintings evoke Pop Art, Neo-Expressionism, and post-digital painting while resisting easy categorization. Her works emerge directly from the act of painting itself: gestural, spontaneous, immediate, and deliberately imperfect. Comics, cartoons, fashion, and digital imagery collide with globally circulating motifs from everyday life and consumer culture. The Pink Panther encounters ET, Pokémon characters meet sneakers, and Crocs appear alongside toilet paper. She contrasts mediatized imagery with oversized still lifes of mundane objects, mirroring her immediate everyday experience. These unlikely juxtapositions are both humorous and unsettling, asserting the freedom and immediacy of painting against the calculated aesthetics of global pop and media culture.

Working from an ambivalent engagement with both the allure and pitfalls of globalized media and consumer culture, Bernhardt develops a distinctive artistic position that interrogates image production, iconography, and the cultural and political potential of painting itself.

The artist will be present.