Katherine Bradford (born 1942) is a painter who lives and works in New York City and Brunswick, Maine. She is conceived as one of the most important positions of contemporary American painting. Since the 1970s, Bradford has unapologetically blazed her own path in the art world, painting daily, and building a community of like-minded artists in both Maine and New York. Bradford paints with a formal inventiveness and a shifting sense of figure and ground, giving narrative weight to her characters who may appear as heroes or lovers, families or couples, businessmen or isolated individuals. Her chromatic scenes, painted in many transparent layers of acrylic, transmit a light-filled quality, and offer metaphorical possibilities as they veer between humor, pathos, and abstraction.
Katherine Bradford has exhibited widely at institutions such as MoMA P.S.1 and the Brooklyn Museum, New York, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Frye Museum, Seattle. Her work is included in collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and The Menil Collection. Bradford was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, and a
Joan Mitchell Grant in 2012.
