Katherine Bernhardt’s boundless visual appetite has established her as one of the most energetic painters working today. She first attracted notice in the early 2000s for her paintings of supermodels taken straight from the pages of fashion magazines such as Elle and Vogue. In the decade following, she began making pattern paintings that feature an ever-expanding list of quotidian motifs: Tacos, coffee makers, toilet paper, cigarettes, E.T., Garfield, Darth Vader, and the Pink Panther make unlikely visual combinations within expansive fields of exuberant color. Bernhardt’s trust in the fundamental underpinnings of painting gives her the freedom to depict anything she wants democratically. Through her index of images, from childhood sticker books to a ketchup bottle, Bernhardt chronicles her life within the broader culture. In a palette ranging from restrained to vivid Day-Glo, Bernhardt paints the canvases face up on her studio floor, employing spray paint, puddles of thinned-out acrylic, and utilitarian brushwork to emphasize aspects of her motifs. Bernhardt’s process is improvisational and loose, at times inviting accident and chance into the works.

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Katherine Bernhardt was born in 1975 in St. Louis, MO, and received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL (1998 )and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, NY (2000).

Her 2022 solo exhibition Katherine Bernhardt: why is a mushroom growing in my shower? was presented at David Zwirner Gallery in London, UK. In 2018, the solo exhibition Katherine Bernhardt: Watermelon World was on view at the Mario Testino Museum (MATE) in Lima, Peru. The previous year, in 2017, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, presented FOCUS: Katherine Bernhardt. Also, in 2017, the artist painted a 60-foot-long mural entitled XXL Superflat Pancake for the St. Louis Contemporary Art Museum. Bernhardt has created a permanent installation for Club Caribe, Cidra, Puerto Rico, and a pool painting at the Nautilus South Beach, Miami Beach (both 2015).

Her work has also been included in significant group exhibitions, such as We Fight to Build a Free World: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz, Jewish Museum, New York (2020); Animal Farm, an exhibition curated by Sadie Laska at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2017); NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, Rubell Museum, Miami, which traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (2015-2017); and Bad Touch, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago (2002).