Katherine Bradford: Sky Swimmers

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, and are 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 I’m attracted 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 material as matter. This is particularly evident when one is looking for the source of light: The figures seem to glow from within.

Katherine Bradford (b. 1942) belongs to an older generation of female artists whose lives have been strongly affected by heteronormative ideas of family: “The effort I had to make to turn my life around so that I could be an artist, a real artist, was a hundred times harder than becoming a gay person. Being a lesbian was a lateral transfer. I think when I was young, I didn’t have the imagination to be a lesbian.” She was born in New York and grew up in Connecticut. After earning a bachelor’s degree in art history at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, she settled in Maine with her husband and had twins. There she joined a group of free spirits, artists, and poets and began actively exploring painting for the first time. After her divorce, at the age of 37, Katherine Bradford moved to New York City with her twins to devote herself entirely to art. There, she soon made contact with other artists, completed an MFA at New York State University, and met her long-term partner. It was not until the 2000s that she began to gain recognition as an artist, with her breakthrough coming in 2016—at the age of 74.

Her works are included in the collections of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Dallas Museum of Art; the Menil Collection, Houston, and the Portland Museum of Art, among others.

Curator: Lisa Felicitas Mattheis (artistic director)

Special thanks to Haverkampf Leistenschneider Gallery (Berlin) and Katherine Bradford.