Katherine Bradford

Receiving the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in 2012, Katherine Bradford is a painterly force in contemporary figuration. She is widely applauded for her jewel-toned palettes, eccentric compositions, and her approach to narrative and figurative painting in a wholly personal, unpredictable way. Inspired by her summers in Maine, Bradford’s oeuvre highlights bathers, swimmers, superheroes, friends, and strangers in ethereal scenes of everyday life. Her paintings notably depict women and children, inspired by the artist’s experiences as a mother, painter, and gay woman coming of age in the 21st century.

Bradford was born in 1942, spending time between her birthplace of New York and Maine. After studying at Bryn Mawr College and later receiving her MFA from Purchase College, Bradford was relatively unknown until she burst onto the scene with her exceptional entry in the 2001 Portland, Maine Biennial. Bradford was a resident faculty member at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009, and was a senior critic at the Yale School of Art in New Haven from 2016-2017. Recently the recipient of a major solo show at the Portland Museum of Art in the summer of 2022, Bradford has also been exhibited in prestigious institutions such as The Modern Art Museum Fort Worth, Texas; MoMA PS 1, New York; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York. She is represented in New York by CANADA, in Berlin by Phillipp Haverkampf, in Portland, Oregon by Adams and Ollman, in Paris and London by Campoli Presti, and in Maine by Caldbeck Gallery.