SELECTED WORKS BY Katherine Bernhardt
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Katherine Bernhardt
Gold Maillot
2006
Acrylic on canvas
244 x 183 cm |
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Katherine Bernhardt�s paintings embody cosmopolitan edginess. Her lush canvases � which themselves pose as the currency of beguiling luxury � incorporate all the fantasy trappings of seduction, decadence and corruption, each charged with sordid soap operatic climax and the command of true-to-type bitches and divas. Looming larger than life, Bernhardt�s demoiselles flaunt exaggerated tales of womanly wiles: a tribe of Amazonian it-girls, goddesses, and super-heroines languishing in the ennui of money, power, and style. |
Katherine Bernhardt
Anna Barrios Pucci Print
2006
Acrylic on canvas
244 x 183 cm |
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Approaching painting as a platform for fiction, Bernhardt�s imagined characters are richly contrived portraits encapsulating both the vacuity of media image and the unpredictable response of consumer over-identification. Rendered with the fury of both adulation and envy, Bernhardt�s models emerge as freakish inventions � all Max Factor raccoon eyes, emaciated limbs, and swollen red pouts; troubled beauties relishing both idolisation and abuse. |
Katherine Bernhardt
Lizard Woman
2006
Acrylic on canvas
183 x 213 cm |
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Far from illustrating wry caricature, Bernhardt�s wildly expressive style illuminates her own complicit role as spell-bound fan. Her paintings are executed with rarefied passion, conveying urgency, obsession, and a desire to emulate through the act of making. Her engagement with beauty is funny, clumsy, and endearingly humiliating. �Getting it right� fashion dissolves into planes of illusive abstraction as designer bikinis transform into ill-fitting triangles, eye-shadow hovers as lurid circles, and pink terrains of skin drip with melting suggestion of fake tan or plastic surgery rumour. Through her casual formalism, Bernhardt uncovers the true secrets of attraction: a beauty that lies in the pureness of sentiment and basic instinct aesthetic, packaged with the uptown savvy of raw ambition. |
Katherine Bernhardt
Pink Cake
2007
Acrylic on canvas
215 x 304 cm |
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ARTIST INFORMATION
ARTICLES
brushes with fame
By Ed Lake, The National (UAE), 6th April 2009
"I'm, like, totally obsessed with models. I try to follow them on the street. I look for them everywhere. I can't get enough of it." So the New York-based painter Katherine Bernhardt told Interview Magazine last year. But do we believe her?
At a first glance around her new show at Carbon 12 in Dubai, it's an open and shut case. Models and honorary models - the fashion-forward singer M.I.A., the fame vampire Paris Hilton - stare out of every frame. "Stare" is the word, too: there's something transfixing, something Medusa-like, about these images. Bernhardt's portraits look blown apart by the force of their own glamour - features stuck on at crazy angles or flying off their faces altogether, limbs pared down to starved spindles, cheekbones sharp as shrapnel. Rilke wrote that beauty is the beginning of terror; these girls seem to have reached its apocalyptic aftermath. "If I didn't like them, I wouldn't paint them," Bernhardt told Simon Houpt in The National last week. If that's really how she feels, she's got a funny way of showing it.
And how does she show it? With a two-inch hardware brush. Goodness knows what she'd use if she felt like being mean. Bernhardt says she can complete several canvases a day; the thing that takes time is priming them with gesso. Then she sets to work with brush and cans of acrylic, splashing out a likeness of one of her favourite muses before casting it aside and moving on to the next. The results look every bit as fast as they are: disposable icons despatched with action-painter's haste.
Speedy they may be. Breezy they aren't. A fug of morbid compulsion hangs over this exhibition - titled, with lethal ambivalence, Wonder Women. Don't think "wonder-workers". Think "cabinet of wonders" - for this gallery of gamine limbs and retrousés noses, panda eyes and trout pouts is truly an enthusiast's collection, hoarded up and gloated over. Bernhardt paints from fashion photo spreads and magazine advertisements, the same names cropping up again and again, the same faces recurring with still greater insistence. Entering her world is like entering some monstrous shrine - so much so, in fact, that one detects the whiff of the put-on. Confronted with the strange uniformity of her work, one moves from noting that, yes, she has a signature subject, to wondering if she might have some sort of fixation, to twigging that - perhaps - she's playing a part.
ead the entire article here
Source: thenational.ae
Something Wild
By Jerry Saltz
Some art we like in spite of ourselves. That's how I feel about the raucous work of 26-year-old Katherine Bernhardt, whose paintings are some of the loosest around. Her style is a hybrid of funk, punk, pop and every kind of expressionism, be it abstract, neo-, German or East Village. She paints things I'm often suspicious of or have seen too many times before: fashion models, consumer goods and pop stars. Her palette is brash and her touch jumpy. Yet Bernhardt's work - for all its flaws - sends me.
Although I sometimes wince at it, I admire her raw, painterly nerve. If gall is something paintings can have, hers have it. She's a natural, even if I can't say exactly what kind of natural that is.
Bernhardt excels at applying streaky mixtures of glitter, thin acrylic and pearlescent paint in quick brush strokes on stark white grounds. She's great at painting big '80s hair. Less than two years out of the School of Visual Arts, Bernhardt has a two-gallery, 36-painting mini-extravaganza - her second solo effort in 18 months. The first, at Team, was as promising as it was offbeat. Loaded with slapdash paintings and scribbly drawings of E.T., Kobe Bryant and Nikes, along with several blaring abstractions and a bevy of fashion portraits, the show displayed a wildly inspired amateurishness.
Bernhardt's current double show evinces the same wildness, though tempered somewhat by ambition. At Team, Nighttime Thong (all works are dated 2001) is a savage redux of a Cosmo cover featuring Jennifer Lopez in a revealing blue bra and polka-dot panties. Bernhardt turns the singer into a possessed devil diva, painting a white star between her eyes à la Manson and giving her an unruly mane of blond and brown hair. Similarly, a portrait of Cher with a butterfly in her curls makes this perennial screwball look all the more disturbing. Elsewhere, Bjö rk is transformed into a contortionist ballerina. A serene beach scene, as bland as any by Alex Katz, shows that Bernhardt is capable of many moods. Unfortunately, two large paintings - one of a fully clothed girl in bed, another after a Versace ad - suffer from the increase in scale, which overpowers her technical prowess. And the girl in bed recalls coy, British "neurotic realist" Martin Maloney. Still, the smaller Freckled Girl, with serpentine locks and too much eye shadow, has a real "Rebel, rebel, your face is a mess" tartiness.
Many of Bernhardt's recent pictures of women reveal a love-hate relationship with femininity and beauty. Unlike Karen Kilimnik, whose approach to glamour and fashion is much more that of an ingenious shrinking violet, Bernhardt cops a more petulant, bitchy and skeptical attitude. Her hand is also freer: Her technique is so unrestrained she might seem to share traits with mega-renegade Sigmar Polke. But Polke is more experimental, cosmic, ambivalent and detached. He's an iconoclast. Bernhardt's all about enthusiasm, animosity, freedom and play.
JERRY SALTZ is art critic for the Village Voice, where this review first appeared.
Read the entire article here
Source: villagevoice.com
ART IN REVIEW; 'Girls Gone Wild'
By Roberta Smith
Despite the title of this exhibition, the 12 women represented have not gone all that wild. They're still mostly painting on stretched canvases that, once complete, hang on the wall in the usual way. But taken together, their styles, techniques and subjects are strikingly diverse and consistently nervy in a way that bodes well for the state of painting.
Most of the work falls between the extremes of the crafty perfection of Cynthia Sisson's small, meticulously dotted surfaces (whose floral motifs are not as demure as they seem) and the slightly abject casualness of Bella Foster's ''Wicked Forest,'' a Polke-like mass of pale brown stains and drips transformed into a thicket by the addition of some small red leaves. Stain painting is put to new uses and pushed to different, impressive extremes in the work of Katherine Bernhardt and Susanna Vapnek. Bettina Sellmann evokes its tradition by partly washing away a finely drawn image of yet another dreamy young thing who might be drowning in her own tears.
Mari Eastman, Mary Weatherford and Terra Fuller hover between the representational and the abstract in a painterly fashion, while Stephanie Campos sticks with abstraction, and a slightly funky geometry reminiscent of late-1970's abstraction. A tough-as-nails figurative style is used to good effect in ''Madonna'' by Dawn Mellor and ''The Artist as Sister Cat Woman'' by Karen Heagle, who has an equally strident solo show at 31 Grand Street, an art gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, through Sunday. And finally, Jutta Koether's fierce, slapdash way with paint and color presides over the ensemble like a guiding spirit, an éminence without a hint of grise.
Read the entire article here
Source: query.nytimes.com
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Other artists in NEWSPEAK: BRITISH ART NOW
littlewhitehead | Tasha Amini | Hurvin Anderson | Maurizio Anzeri | Jonathan Baldock | Anna Barriball | Steve Bishop | Karla Black | Pablo Bronstein | Carla Busuttil | Spartacus Chetwynd | Steven Claydon | William Daniels | Matthew Darbyshire | Peter Davies | Robert Dowling | Graham Durward | Tim Ellis | Dick Evans | Tessa Farmer | Robert Fry | Jaime Gili | Anthea Hamilton | Anne Hardy | Nicholas Hatfull | Iain Hetherington | Alexander Hoda | Sigrid Holmwood | Systems House | Graham Hudson | Dean Hughes | Mustafa Hulusi | Paul Johnson | Edward Kay | Scott King | Peter Linde Busk | Christina Mackie | Alastair MacKinven | Goshka Macuga | Jill Mason | Alan Michael | Ryan Mosley | Rupert Norfolk | Arif Ozakca | Mark Pearson | Dan Perfect | Peter Peri | Henrijs Preiss | Ged Quinn | Clunie Reid | Barry Reigate | Maaike Schoorel | Dallas Seitz | Fergal Stapleton | Clare Stephenson | Jack Strange | Adam Thompson | Caragh Thuring | Phoebe Unwin | Donald Urquhart | Jonathan Wateridge | John Wynne | Toby Ziegler
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