For this year’s Berlin Gallery Weekend, Haverkampf Leistenschneider is delighted to present new works by Katherine Bradford (b. 1942, New York). The artist will be present for the exhibition’s opening. 

Like dreams, Bradford’s paintings have an ability to make the ‘everyday’ become utterly, glowingly strange. The US American artist is celebrated globally for her bright color-field compositions populated by enigmatic figures, and for inviting us to find metaphysical significance in small, out-of-joint details. 

This selection of new works attests to the artist’s long-standing interest in the tensions between intimacy, isolation, empathy, and dependency that constitute a life lived among others. The group scenes here are warm, familiar, and charged with Bradford’s characteristic humor, but are also rarely without hints of friction or shades of ambivalence. We see figures huddling together before a painting, but attention is split by a screen that doubles it. Onlookers surround a stiffly supine body, something haunting about their stoic, faceless passivity. Heads of dinner guests drop heavily into plates of food, trading the social for the oblivion of sleep. 

While so much of Bradford’s work explores states of weightlessness—swimming, floating, flying or drifting—in this exhibition, buoyancy is contrasted by a number of images in which bodies are collapsed or horizontal, overcome by gravity. We could wonder whether this posture acts as a counter-metaphor to the joyous freedom of her weightless figures, untethered from both earthly forces and social expectations while others succumb to the gravity of daily existence. But that sounds more cynical than Bradford’s paintings ever appear. Perhaps it’s simply another register of her attentiveness to the delicate thresholds between connection and withdrawal, animation, and rest. In these works, the drag of gravity doesn’t negate the possibility of transcendence, just renders it more precarious—and, as such, more human. 

Opening: Friday, May 1st, 6-9 pm

Artist Talk | Neue Nationalgalerie: Sunday, May 3rd, 11:00 am

The Power of Abstract Figuration: An Artist Talk with Katherine Bradford | In conversation with Chloe Stead (Associate editor frieze)