Katherine Bradford

Katherine Bradford (b. 1942, New York) paints vibrant canvases that place characters, including mothers, superheroes, and swimmers, in abstract fields of saturated and sumptuous color.

Her buoyant, luminous compositions feature dreamy and otherworldly settings such as outer space or the open sea. Bradford creates these galactic depths by laying down layer after layer of acrylic paint, rubbing or scraping it away—techniques that create texture. Her surfaces therefore appear to glow — “many thin layers of paint [are] inflected [with] small glints of light,” as Bradford has described it.

Bradford’s subjects, which include isolated houses in addition to people in their underwear, often appear vulnerable and exposed. When describing her draw to the nighttime ocean as subject, Bradford explained that it had“everything a painter might need: endless mystery and lack of boundaries, hidden stories and dramatic light.” Steeped in narrative ambiguity, her canvases evoke a certain moody affect. Her figures appear somewhat awkward with economical faces and bodies. Interested in plunging the depths of “who we are, how we fit in…how [we] look and [are] with one another,” as the artist put it, she uses strategies of abstraction and androgyny to explore ideas of self and identity. Bradford’s paintings embrace unknowing, allowing the viewer to feel their way through painted expanses both fantastical and entirely familiar.

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