Katherine Bradford

Katherine Bradford’s luminous canvases are populated by anonymous swimmers, bathers, acrobats and superheroes, figures that drift across oceans, night skies and expansive fields of colour. Working through layered applications of acrylic paint that are brushed, scraped and repeatedly reworked, Bradford creates surfaces that appear to glow from within, balancing expansive colour with loosely rendered bodies and unstable spatial depth. Her compositions resist fixed narrative, instead allowing meaning to emerge through gesture, light and the relationships between figures. Through androgynous forms and fluid, open-ended settings, Bradford explores the vulnerability of human connection, creating paintings akin to emotional refuges, imbued with a quiet sense of transcendence.

Bradford was born in New York in 1942. She received a BA from Bryn Mawr College, followed by an MFA from the State University of New York. Bradford is the recipient of numerous awards, including awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2005, 2011); a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011); a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2012); and the Rappaport Prize (2021). Major solo exhibitions include presentations at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick (2013) and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth (2017); Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford at the Portland Museum of Art (2022) and the Frye Art Museum (2023); American Odyssey at Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Graz (2024); and Sky Swimmers at Kunsthalle Emden, Emden (2024). Her work has also been included in significant group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, New York (1997); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2019); The FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2023, 2024); the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris (2024); and the Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa (2024). Her work is held in major public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Boston; the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris; and the Portland Museum of Art, Portland. Bradford currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.