the semi-finalist is: Katherine Bradford

12/8/2025

the semi-finalist is: Katherine Bradford

The Gifting Bowl
2025, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 72 inches (152.40 × 182.88 cm)

The faces are largely eyeless, noseless, and mouthless. Hair and clothing are at most suggestions. But all of this makes sense in a world where fingers don’t bother with fingernails and shoes are too busy for laces. Even the proverbial man in the moon is somewhere off-stage in Katherine Bradford’s paintings, leaving her spare satellites to do what moons do best in an inky dark sky: glow and illuminate.
I’ve long admired Bradford’s ability to suggest a complete universe with nothing but paired down shapes and electric colors. It’s a form of figuration where less is more and the viewer gets to fill in the blanks with a participatory imagination. Like illustrations in the children’s books I was most drawn to as a child (Anything by Eric Carle or Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson), her dreamy figures are conjured up with a sense of reserve. Heads, hands, feet and planets all orbit one another, tethered not so much by gravity, but by color, shape, and a shared simplicity. As beautiful and playful as they are, however, Bradford’s paintings also have a heft that sets them apart. This comes in part from her ability to build eccentric compositions on an architectural scale. Stacked and welded with untamed brushstrokes and declarative lines, her images teeter on the brink - the sweet spot for so many painters - but never collapse. Bradford also smartly avoids painting with rote technical skill. She instead presents an emotional reality that - like real feelings - is full of irregular proportions, surreal connections, disorienting fragments, and unexpected chromatic pairings. The colors, layers, splatters, and glops all coalesce to describe an inner world thematically unfolding on canvas after canvas, improvised stories dedicated to both ordinary moments and life’s most opaque mysteries. Expertly crafted out of a personal and idiosyncratic visual language, Bradford’s paintings are homemade meals in a world hawking protein bars; they are pages from a poet’s diary in a bookstore full of instruction manuals.

I’m so happy to be able to share my interview with Katherine Bradford as well as images from recent visits to her studio and her show at Canada Gallery in New York.

-David Schell (December, 2025)

Katherine Bradford in her studio.

The Semi-Finalist: I know that your biography is well known at this point, but can you talk a little bit about how you got started as an artist?

Katherine Bradford: When I was living in Maine in the 70's I met an unwieldy bunch of passionate artists. I watched in awe as they dedicated their lives, their time and their talent to focus on making art. This was a revelation to me and I saw for the first time what an "artist's life" consisted of. I hadn't been to art school or tried to make much art, but I wanted the kind of intensity and independence that I saw that they had in their lives. Many of them were poets and when there was a poetry reading the visual artists were asked to hang up a sample of their recent work. That was my first foray into displaying something I made. My first solo show was held at the local Pizza place in the year 1978. I was hooked.

Paintings in the artist's studio.

S-F: When I visited your studio, Matisse in Morocco by Jeff Koehler was on your coffee table. Can you describe your relationship to Matisse or any other colorists that come to mind?

KB: I learned from this book (published this year) that Matisse left Paris to spend the winter in Morocco. It was early on in his career and he wanted to get away from the dominant style in Paris at that time (Cubism) and do paintings with the light and color of a distant Mediterranean country. Looking at these early paintings by Matisse I see a lot of experimentation. He simplified his people into shapes and stuck color on them wherever he liked. In his famous "Moroccan Cafe" painting of 1913, he showed a group of men with no facial features, just beautifully placed oval heads grouped together. Early on he painted very freely, letting mistakes show and letting one color bleed into another. I was hooked.

While Father Sleeps
2025, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 120 inches (182.88 × 304.80 cm)

S-F: Bold color and a sense of fragility live side by side in your work like the best of friends. Discuss.

KB: I don't believe color to be color unless it is bold. And I don't believe people to be people unless they show some fragility. The early portraits of the rich and powerful don't interest me much. I like to see the complexity of human emotions and the body language of struggle and a long life. My swimmers are not sexy and buff. They are universal bodies intent on forging ahead however they might be encumbered.

Detail of While Father Sleeps

Left: Tricolor Sun2025, acrylic on canvas, 40 × 30 inches (101.60 × 76.20 cm)

Right: Low Shining Sun2025, acrylic on canvas, 40 × 30 inches (101.60 × 76.20 cm)

(in Communal Table at Canada Gallery, 2025)

S-F: I’m drawn to the way you have themes that you return to in your work again and again, as well as new ones emerging all the time. Talk about your approach to developing a motif through iteration.

KB: One way of showing a group of people is to line them up, side by side like vertical stripes. Another way is to gather them in a circle around a table or a camp fire. And my most popular way is to gather them all together in a pool of paint, blue paint that looks and feels like water. During my quest to do swimmers I made some of them diving in the water or more freely, diving through the air. Perhaps by mistake I made some of them too colorful - they began to look more like superheroes than bathers. That was a fun idea to explore because i got tired of people who stood upright at the bottom of a painting and i realized that any combination of color looked like a superhero and the flyer could take a place anywhere in the rectangle of the painting.

Above and below: a bather (Diver Under Moon, 2025) at Canada Gallery and a superhero in the studio.

S-F: Communal Table, your painting up at Canada Gallery this month, is a monumental ode to the simple act of gathering together. Can you talk about how this idea developed?

KB: I painted this painting over an earlier very colorful one of standing figures. I deliberately chose to have the people take up space up and down the sides and along the top. Having them all sit at a table and be all different colors was an idea I'd been interested in before. After I finished the painting I realized that the gallery where I was showing, Canada in Tribeca, New York, had a big communal table where all the staff worked side by side instead of in separate cubicles. So the idea of a table with people seated around it took on a much larger and more universal meaning to me. I had been searching for a title for the whole show and this idea of community together appealed to me especially since we've had to listen to the daily news which has been having a divisive effect on the whole country.

Above: Communal Table
2025, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 68 inches (182.88 × 172.72 cm)

Below: Detail of Communal Table

S-F: Who are you looking at (alive or dead)?

KB: I'm looking at my most alive friends (you know who you are) and my most wonderful spirit guides like Marsden Hartley, Philip Guston, Matisse, Milton Avery, Susan Rothenberg and Mark Rothko.

From the often returned to theme of Women Leaving
(in the studio)

S-F: What’s next (shows, residencies, etc.)?

KB: I'm planning a solo show in Seoul, Korea at Gallery Hyundai and a show in Berlin during their gallery week and I'll be in a group show at Broadway Gallery on the theme of Night Swimming.

Small paintings in the studio.

You can see more of Katherine Bradford's work:
- on her instagram account: @kathebradford
- at Canada Gallery in New York
- at Adams and Ollman in Portland, OR
- all over the internet, just type in her name.