Featuring a fierce-looking Pikachu, vibrant colors, 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, embracing mis-registrations, ink splashes, and other incidental byproducts of the printing process.

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.