Katherine Bradford

Katherine Bradford (born 1942), née Houston, is an American artist based in New York City, known for figurative paintings, particularly of swimmers, that critics describe as simultaneously representational, abstract and metaphorical. She began her art career relatively late and has received her widest recognition in her seventies and eighties. Critic John Yau characterizes her work as independent of canon or genre dictates, open-ended in terms of process, and quirky in its humor and interior logic. Campoli Presti (London and Paris), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Brooklyn Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, and Tomio Koyama (Tokyo). She has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim, Joan Mitchell and Pollock-Krasner foundations and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work belongs to public art collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and Portland Art Museum, among others.

Bradford lives with her spouse Jane O'Wyatt, in New York City and Brunswick, Maine, and works out of a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Early life and career Bradford was born in 1942 in New York City and grew up in Connecticut. When she was a child, her mother discouraged the bohemian life of the arts, despite Bradford's grandfather, Jacques André Fouilhoux, being a prominent architect. After earning a BA at Bryn Mawr College, Bradford married Peter A. Bradford and raised twins born in 1969; her children are writer and filmmaker Arthur Bradford and Laura Bradford, who is a lawyer and law professor. When the family moved to Maine in the early 1970s, she joined an art community there that included Lois Dodd and Yvonne Jacquette, among others. In the 2000s, Bradford has exhibited at the CANADA, Sperone Westwater and Pace galleries in New York, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Campoli Presti, and the New Orleans Biennial (Prospect.4, 2017), among others. In 2022, the first museum survey of Bradford's work, "Flying Woman," was organized by the Portland Museum of Art and traveled to the Frye Art Museum.

In addition to artmaking, Bradford taught at Illinois State University, Ohio State University and SUNY Purchase, before joining the faculties at Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) (1995–2011) and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1997–2012). Critics suggest that she weights color, iconography and narrative equally in her work, privileging exploration and formal and metaphorical possibility over conclusiveness.

Art in America'''s Robert Berlind characterizes her method as "predicated on a trust in possibilities beyond her conscious intentions or formal inclinations, and on a responsiveness to what shows up on the canvas." Bradford has said that she does not begin with a plan, but rather draws on her ongoing vocabulary of forms, discovering each image through the painting process and intuition. Artcritical editor David Cohen writes that she combines "the peculiar poetic charm and nonchalance of provisional painting with the energy, seriousness, and resolve of classic abstract painting"; he compares her formal evolution to Philip Guston's ("high-abstraction-to-low-realism") but differentiates her treatment of subjects as romantic, heartfelt, and whimsical.

In her late 1990s work, Bradford moved closer to iconographic representation, depicting box forms and figures with bold, heavy lines and a comedic or darkly humorous tone.

Bradford received wider attention with work in the 2000s centered on marine imagery: ethereal ocean liners, sailboats, sea battles, and other-worldly aliens or vulnerable figures that suggested spiritual or intellectual illumination emerging out of darkness (e.g., Lake Sisters, 2004, Traveler, 2004 and Hydra Head, 2006). Critics characterize these paintings as both mysterious and direct, with simple, ambiguously scaled and combined elements, fluid sea-sky realms, and surfaces of abraded brushstrokes, dabs and scumbling that evoke rather define form.

Critics observe that Bradford's later marine paintings move further from representational picture-space toward more open-ended, abstract "painting-space." In this work, unearthly lit, foreshortened, monolithic ships read equally as abstract, irregular trapezoids alluding to Minimalist sculpture, set against grounds that function as moody color fields and slabs of pure color (e.g., Titanic Orange Sea and Sargasso, both 2012).

Superman paintings Katherine Bradford, Superman Responds, Night, oil on canvas, , 2011.

In the early 2010s, Bradford began painting plunging figures and idiosyncratic, caped "Superman" characters, set against soft color fields or atmospheric matte skies marked with star bursts and zigzags suggesting paths (e.g., Superman Responds, Night, 2011). Other writers, however, suggest they represent new symbols of strength in vulnerability, visionary individualism, personal exploration, and perhaps, Bradford herself. Often painted in water-soluble acrylic—ideal for mimicking the effects of water in images of swimmers, bathers and surfers—these paintings take more formal risks, with complex compositions of multiple figures and divided grounds of otherworldly, nocturnal planetary-oceanic environments. Other paintings, like the diagonally divided, vertical Fear of Waves (2016), introduce an element of uncertainty or calamity whose specific threat and outcome remains a mystery; the bird's-eye view work depicts a crowd of swimmers fleeing giant, leftward-moving waves toward through a turquoise impasto, conveying a sense of insignificance against the unfathomable. The former shows were characterized by vibrant pinks, magentas, purples and yellows, directly drawn thick outline, monumental scale, and the use of gesture and facial direction rather than expression to convey emotion. In paintings such as Olympiad (2018), she experimented with colors mixed with fluorescent magenta paint and improbable arrangements of figures that balanced interests in how subjects fit together as abstract compositional elements and as potential social communities. The painting Couple No Shirts (2018) depicted an androgynous, economically drawn couple that implied a sense of universality while examining assumptions regarding categorization and looking. and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and Hall Art Foundation, Bradford exhibited more moody, figurative paintings depicting varying degrees of familial intimacy and maternal feeling. Her figures remained ambiguous—crudely drawn in contour lines, they diffused into Rothko-like abstract fields of color—but dominated their frames more, connecting through spare gestures and contact that conveyed themes of vulnerability, longtime affection and heroic care (e.g., Fever, Mother's Lap and Mother Carry).

Awards, commissions and collections Bradford has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011), and awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2012), American Academy of Arts and Letters (2011, 2005), and Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2000). They include three large works collectively titled Queens of the Night—which depict figures in dancelike poses against a sapphire blue background—and two smaller works of flying superheroes, titled Superhero Responds.

Bradford's work belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Cantor Arts Center, Hall Art Foundation, ICA Boston, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Portland Museum of Art (Maine), Rose Art Museum, Tang Museum, and Worcester Art Museum, among others.