For our first time participating in The Art Show, Two Palms is pleased to present a body of new monotypes from Katherine Bernhardt.
“I guess that's my aesthetic. Raw, stained, messy, using-your-hand-in-it art.”
- Katherine Bernhardt
Katherine Bernhardt has developed a singular voice in painting through a process that is improvisational and loose. Her Pattern paintings feature figures from American pop culture such as E.T. and Bart Simpson floating in expansive fields of exuberant color amongst everyday items like toilet paper, cigarettes and Clorox bottles. Lacking illusion, perspective and logical scale, Bernhardt’s work draws on the tradition of Moroccan rugs and their graphic, two-dimensional pictoral language, as well as the work of artists from the Pattern and Decoration Movement of the 1970s.
Bernhardt’s work is highly autobiographical. She explores each of her obsessions thoroughly, be it mushrooms or Crocs, before moving on to another, chronicling her life and broader culture along the way. Her loose, freehanded style is hard earned and her seemingly random gathering of imagery belies her formalist tendencies.
Bernhardt’s habit of inviting accident and chance into her work translates perfectly into the print studio, a space ripe for exploring, where an artist must relinquish some control to the press and the transfer of image from plate to paper. At Two Palms, Bernhardt works quickly letting one quotidian motif draw forth another, reacting all the while to the boisterous colors she has laid down in crayon and watercolor on a wooden plate.