Details:
① Artwork:
Ditto
Featuring a purple Ditto with neon pink accents, Japanese characters, and recognizable symbols from the Pokémon universe, this large-scale lithograph, which resembles a supersized Pokémon card, is rendered in Bernhardt’s signature exuberant style. As with her painting practice, the artist approaches printmaking instinctively, often embracing mis-registrations, ink splashes, and other incidental byproducts of the printing process. As Bernhardt notes: "Each time you make a print you can change the colors of the inks so it morphs, like Ditto."
The print relates to a body of work that Bernhardt initiated in 2021, which features the artist’s familiar obsessions and new subjects, including Ditto from Pokémon, Crocs footwear, magic mushrooms, and bathroom showers. In her imagery, Bernhardt playfully joins the absurd and the relevant, touching on cultural trends in addition to her young son’s most recent fixations.
Katherine Bernhardt's boundless visual appetite has established her as one of the most energetic painters working today. Having gained prominence in the early 2000s for her spirited depiction of celebrities and models, Bernhardt appropriated much of her imagery at the time from fashion periodicals such as Elle and Vogue. In the decade following, she began making "pattern paintings" that equally reference pop art and the serial repetition in certain modes of postwar painting. Juxtaposing an ever-expanding list of quotidian motifs—tacos, coffee makers, toilet paper, cigarettes, E.T., Garfield, Darth Vader, and the Pink Panther—these works feature unlikely combinations within flat, expansive fields of exuberant color.
Specs:
Printed by Counter Editions, Margate. Published by Utopia Editions and Counter Editions.
③ Artist:
Katherine Bernhardt’s (b. 1975) boundless visual appetite has established her as one of the most energetic painters working today. Her trust in the fundamental underpinnings of painting gives her the freedom to depict anything she wants, and the democratizing surfaces of her canvases work without illusion, perspective, logical scale shifts, or atmosphere. With Bernhardt’s blunt yet lyrical approach, each painting has the feel of a complete thought that engages rich and raucous free association.
In 2023, David Zwirner’s Hong Kong location presented a solo exhibition of new works by Bernhardt. In 2022, the artist’s work was on view in Katherine Bernhardt: Why is a mushroom growing in my shower? at the gallery’s London location.
Work by the artist is found in prominent public and museum collections worldwide, including The Brant Foundation, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; Rubell Museum, Miami; and the San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas. Bernhardt lives and works in St. Louis.