katherine bradford: sky swimmers

Emden. Large-format works by artist Katherine Bradford (*1942 in New York City) are now on display in the airy atrium of the Kunsthalle Emden. Bradford’s works are a mixture of figuration and abstraction. Recurring motifs are swimmers and superheroes in mystical, surreal scenarios.

After initially working in rural Maine and exchanging ideas in a small circle of artists, Katherine Bradford decided at the age of 37 to leave her marriage behind and move to New York City with her children. There she connected with the painterly avant-garde of the 1980s and 1990s and the up-and-coming art scene in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. lnfluenced on the one hand by the color field painting of the New York School as well as by older figurative positions of American classica! modernism, the artist developed dreamlike and symbolic scenes. The exhibition in Emden is one of the artist’s first institutional solo exhibitions in Germany.

With Katherine Bradford. Sky Swimmers, Kunsthalle Emden is proud to be one of the first European institutions to present a solo exhibition of the American artist. Katherine Bradford (b. 1942) creates works that are characterized by a blend of figuration and abstraction along with a vibrant, contemporary color palette; her recurring motifs of swimmers, supermen, and acrobats populate the canvases in mystical, surreal scenes, andare the focus of the exhibition in Emden. These anonymous figures-some truncated, some whole-appear ghostly and other-worldly. Strong painterly reduction breaks them down to the essentials: devoid of faces, characteristic body features, or gender classification, the figures seem mysterious and masked. They are depicted in suspended states, in which both the before and the after are ambiguous: thus, they are made a commonplace of human existence. Whether the bodies are standing, swimming, or floating, their interrelations can be read as a visual metaphor for social relationships such as community and isolation, vulnerability and strength, and activity and passivity.

for the artist, it makes no difference whether the figures are arranged in water or against the sky: “I think l’m attraeteci to the sky, the ocean, and outer space, because you can tip it in all of those directions pretty easily. You can slide from the ocean right into outer space.” A brushstroke can change the dynamics of the painting; a shade of color can alter the reference space. In her highly intuitive painting style, in which memory, idea and imagination intermingle, the artist models the figures out of the background. To Bradford, paint is not so much materiai as matter. This is particularly evident when one is looking for the source of light: The figures seem to glow from within.