“I make these paintings, because I see painting going in a direction I don’t want. It’s either too sweet or too critical.”

Katherine Bradford in conversation with Karen Wilkin, When the Swimmers Climb Out of the Water, New York 2018

HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark is delighted to host Katherine Bradford’s first comprehensive institutional exhibition in Europe. Bradford is conceived as one of the most important positions of contemporary American painting. The show will present fifteen crucial works of the last decade from collections in New York, as well as a cycle of twenty-three new paintings, which the artist produced especially for the exhibition. In her striking works over many decades, Bradford has been developing a very personal ongoing story about painting, which she tells and retells with ever new variations. In recent years, she has taken this to an unprecedented level of the interplay of form, color, and light with ​“her” mysteriously present bodies. The presentations of these strange, present, and self-determined bodies in their highly expressive positions — standing, sitting, lying or suspended, — leads to an astounding focus on something very essential. Even after such a long and eventful American Odyssey, the artist remains positive about humanity — and she invites us to share the sentiment. Her art stands for a vibrant and yet inherently critical humanism which it is good to see in complex times such as ours.

Painting can do all this if the painter can. Katherine Bradford doesn’t just do it, she does it day after day.

The exhibition is accompanied by a continuous program of events and education, and a comprehensive publication by JRP|Editions, Geneva.