Katherine Bradford: American Odyssey

HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark is delighted to host Katherine Bradford’s first comprehensive institutional exhibition in Europe. Bradford is conceived as one of the most important positions of contemporary American painting. The show will present crucial works of the last decade from US collections, as well as a cycle of new paintings, which the artist produced especially for the exhibition. In her striking works over many decades, Bradford has been developing a very personal ongoing story about painting, 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 with “her” mysteriously present bodies. The presentations of these strange, present and self-determined bodies in their highly expressive positions — standing, sitting, lying or suspended, — leads to an astounding focus on something essential. Even after such a long and eventful American Odyssey, the artist remains positive about humanity — and she invites us to share the sentiment. Her art stands for a vibrant and yet inherently critical humanism which it is good to see in complex times such as ours.

Interestingly, in the past decade a prominent number of mainly US-American women artists has come to the fore of a new interest in painting, gradually taking over from their mainly male colleagues who for so long dominated the scene. Among this influential group of female painters Katherine Bradford stands out, having made a breakthrough with her own very personal approach in the USA in recent years, and now also internationally — at the age of 81. Those connections have also been fundamental to Bradford’s own American Odyssey: consequent to the move from Maine to New York City, she became part of an artist community. Her nowadays’ casual and self-confident works were preceded by a very personal search and positioning in the field of painting. Initially working abstractly, she gradually found her way to the figurative; from superheroes to swimmers and larger-than-life bodies made up of color fields. 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 very evident but also interrupted, resisting to become too explicit, remaining allusive and ultimately mysterious. Movement and space are key, but strangely restricted to the painting and the canvas. Paint is not so much a liquid as a substance. Finally, Bradford’s use of light is special, as she makes her figures shine out. Painting can do all this if the painter can. Katherine Bradford doesn’t just do it, she does it day after day.

The exhibition is accompanied by a continuous program of events and education, and a comprehensive publication by JRP Editions, Geneva.

Katherine Bradford‘s works are amongst others in the collections of Musée d‘Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Menil Collection, Houston and the Portland Museum of Art.

Curator: Sandro Droschl. Program, discourse and art education: halle-fuer-kunst.at. Press inquiries: Helga Droschl, hd@halle-fuer-kunst.at; T +43 316 740084