Since the 1970s, Katherine Bradford has unapologetically blazed her own path in the art world, painting daily, and building a community of like-minded artists in both Maine and New York. Bradford paints with a formal inventiveness and a shifting sense of figure and ground, giving narrative weight to her characters who may appear as heroes or lovers, families or couples, businessmen or isolated individuals. Her chromatic scenes, painted in many transparent layers of acrylic, transmit a light-filled quality, and offer metaphorical possibilities as they veer between humor, pathos, and abstraction.
A Guggenheim Award winner, Bradford is a New York-based painter. 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.