Katherine Bradford
Artist Spotlight
Katherine Bradford: Swimming Into the Light
Something has shifted in the art world's relationship with Katherine Bradford, and the shift feels long overdue and entirely right. In recent years, her work has moved from the warm embrace of downtown New York's artist community into major institutional and collector consciousness, with solo exhibitions at CANADA gallery in New York and shows with Alison Jacques in London bringing her luminous canvases to international audiences. Now in her eighties, Bradford is living proof that a painter's most celebrated chapter can arrive late and arrive brilliantly, her work as vital and searching as… Continue reading
Artists in conversation
Milton Avery
Avery shared Bradford's fascination with luminous color fields and simplified figurative forms set against water and sky, creating works with a similarly serene and dreamlike atmosphere.
Eric Fischl
Fischl's large scale figurative paintings frequently situate vulnerable human figures in aquatic and domestic settings, exploring psychological undercurrents that resonate closely with Bradford's thematic concerns.
Cecily Brown
Brown's gestural and expressive figuration, in which bodies dissolve into swirling color and paint, shares Bradford's approach to merging abstraction with figurative imagery in large scale compositions.
Artists who inspired them
Philip Guston
Guston's bold return to figurative imagery loaded with psychological weight and his embrace of cartoonish symbolic forms directly informed Bradford's use of iconic figures like superheroes within expressive painterly contexts.
Mark Rothko
Rothko's exploration of luminous color fields as vehicles for emotional and spiritual experience is a clear precursor to Bradford's glowing atmospheric backgrounds and her interest in transcendence through color.
Joan Mitchell
Mitchell's energetic gestural brushwork and her ability to evoke landscape and sensation through abstract mark making provided a foundational model for Bradford's own expressive and color driven painting practice.