Katherine Bernhardt

Bernhardt paints a brightly hued portrait of the glorious jumble of contemporary life

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of Katherine Bernhardt’s wildly popular pattern paintings. Spanning 2013 through 2016, it collects over 100 of her brightly colored canvases. Well known for paintings of super models ripped from glossy fashion magazines and, more recently, Morrocan rug motifs, in 2013 Bernhardt dropped all direct quotation and now paints straight from her imagination, mining her own fertile reservoir of experience, imagery and sensation. Since then, Bernhardt has produced paintings that mix an assortment of objects reflecting her daily experiences, from life in New York to her love of Puerto Rico, her Saint Louis roots and family life. The objects are painted with incredible verve and tenacity, and include a jumble of the following items on colorfully activated grounds: watermelon slices, boom boxes, computers, pizza slices, cassette tapes, hamburgers, basketballs, old cell phones, airplanes, fruit, sharks, water, sea turtles, cigarettes, sharpies and keyboards. Bernhardt presents a slightly delirious feeling of New York City, the out-of-date and the up-to-the-minute all in one.

Katherine Bernhardt< was born in Saint Louis in 1975 and currently lives in New York. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her first solo museum exhibition will be at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in January 2017, followed by The Modern, Fort Worth, in April 2017.

The artist's raucous compositions read more like butt-dialed emojigrams...Bernhardt's lexicon indulges a pronounced nostalgia for the Day-Glo disposables of the late 1980s and early 90s-- curly-corded telephones, Sharpies, Rubiks Cubes, ChapStick tubes, Pac-Man, Papa Smurf...This rollicking volume supplements more than one hundred pattern paintings. (Kate Sutton Bookforum)

Bernhardt's super-optical fabulous-monsters ... shattered one of the last taboos of women’s art: to paint messy, expressionistic, garish things. (Jerry Saltz Vulture)