"We can’t figure out exactly what is going on. The longer we look, the more suggestive Bradford’s abraded brushstrokes, dabs, irregular patches and scumbling become. It’s as if we have entered a trance-like state that is similar to the one possessing the figures in her paintings. Bradford knows her medium well enough to trust it, and, more importantly, to let her marks become evocative without nudging them into an easily definable realm." - John Yau
Guggenheim Award winner Katherine Bradford (American, b. 1942) is a New York-based painter best known for her large paintings of swimmers under dramatic skies of planets and stars. In her forties she moved from her home in Maine to New York City bringing her school age twins with her as a single mother. She taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1997-2012) and was Senior Critic in the Yale MFA program (2016-2017). Now in her eighties, she paints full time in a studio in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn where she was among the first group of artists in the neighborhood. This past season she has had solo shows at her New York gallery, Canada, at Hyundai Gallery in Seoul Korea, and at Haverkampf Gallery in Berlin. Museum survey shows include the Portland Museum of Art, the Frye Museum in Seattle, Modern Museum at Fort Worth Texas and Kunsthaus Graz Contemporary Museum, Austria. Group shows include David Zwirner, the ICA Boston, and Sperone Westwater. She is also represented by Kaufman Repetto in Milan, Tomio Koyama in Tokyo and Matthew Brown in LA. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in DC, and the Menil Family Collection in Texas, among others. Bradford’s glass mosaic murals, commissioned by the MTA’s Arts and Design department and collectively titled “Queens of the Night,” can be seen at the north and south mezzanines and three staircases at the Avenue A end of the 1st Avenue Station in Manhattan.