Katherine Bradford: American Odyssey

About

“I make these paintings, because I see painting going in a direction I don’t want. It’s either too sweet or too critical.”
Katherine Bradford in conversation with Karen Wilkin, When the Swimmers Climb Out of the Water, New York 2018

HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark is delighted to be hosting the first museum exhibition in Europe of Katherine Bradford, one of the most important positions in contemporary American painting. The show focuses on works from the last decade, including a new cycle of works produced especially for the occasion.

In her striking works over many decades, Bradford has been developing a very personal ongoing story about and through painting, which she retells with ever new variations. In recent years she has taken this to an unprecedented level 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, suspended, connected — leads to an astounding focus on something very essential. Even after such a long and eventful American Odyssey, Katherine Bradford 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.

The exhibition is accompanied by a program of events and education, and a comprehensive publication at JRP Editions, New York/​Zurich.