Katherine Bernhardt

Europe’s first institutional show of Katherine Bernhardt highlights her bold, colorful works blending Pop Art, Neo-Expressionism, and post-digital painting with expressive spontaneity. About Bernhardt’s pictorial worlds are shaped by globally circulating visual systems: comics, cartoons, advertising, fashion, and digital media intersect with motifs drawn from everyday life and consumer culture. Characters such as Pink Panther, Garfield, Pac-Man, or figures from the Pokémon universe encounter sneakers, Crocs, cigarettes, mushrooms, or toilet paper rolls. In seemingly spontaneous constellations, the artist combines motifs that appear unrelated at first glance, creating visual spaces that are at once humorous and unsettling. Executed directly with spray paint and acrylic on canvas, Bernhardt’s works reject perspective, illusion, and atmospheric depth. Instead, they unfold as open pictorial fields in which pop aesthetics, consumer culture, and personal associations overlap. The repeated use of certain figures and objects simultaneously evokes serial image production and strategies of Appropriation Art. Yet Bernhardt continually subverts any rigid system through her intuitive and almost improvisational compositions. Balancing irony, sensory overload, and playful lightness, her works generate a distinctive ambivalence: familiar consumer images shift into the surreal, while humorous motifs acquire an underlying darker tone. Each painting appears as a self-contained visual thought that sets off a chain of free associations. The exhibition presents a selection of key works from recent years and offers insight into Bernhardt’s unmistakable visual language through a carefully conceived exhibition parcours. It provides a comprehensive perspective on an artist whose work combines the expressive freedom of painting with the visual codes of global popular culture. Curated by Sandro Droschl Artists Participating artists Katherine Bernhardt *1975 St. Louis, Missouri, lives in St. Louis Solo exhibitions (selection): Canada, New York (2026), David Zwirner, Los Angeles (2025), Gangneung Art Museum Sorol, Gangwon-do, South Korea (2025), Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul Arts Center, Seoul (2025), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas (2025, with Jeremy Scott), David Zwirner, Hong Kong (2023), Canada, New York (2023), David Zwirner, London (2022), Diablo Rosso, Panama (2021), Canada, New York (2020), NANZUKA, Tokyo (2019), Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (2019), Museo Mario Testino (MATE ), Lima (2018), Canada, New York (2018), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2017), St. Louis Contemporary Art Museum, Missouri (2017), Karma, Amagansett, New York (2017), Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (2016), Venus Over Los Angeles, Los Angeles, New York (2015), Carl Freedman Gallery, London (2015), Canada, New York (2008), Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris (2006), Gallery Lisa Ruyter, Vienna (2004), Team Gallery, New York (2000). Group exhibitions (selection): High Line Art, New York (2026), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Park, Washington DC (2022), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2021), The Drawing Center, New York (2020), Jewish Museum, New York (2020), The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, Connecticut (2017), Pratt Institute, New York (2017), National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington (2017), Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016), Rubell Museum, Miami (2015). Read more Toggle Photography Painting Mixed media