Katherine Bernhardt
Katherine Bernhardt: FRUIT SALAD
July 26, 2015 - September 1, 2016
Unveiling and celebration: Sunday, July 26th, 4:00 - 7:00 pm
VENUS
601 South Anderson Street
Los Angeles, CA 90023
(Los Angeles, CA) – This summer, VENUS is excited to present, KATHERINE BERNHARDT: FRUIT SALAD, a large mural covering the exterior walls of the Los Angeles gallery; a public iteration of her signature wildly colorful still life patterned paintings. FRUIT SALAD will serve both as Katherine Bernhardt’s first foray into executing a public mural, and as a prelude to her upcoming solo exhibition at VENUS’s Manhattan gallery in September.
Katherine Bernhardt’s recent series of paintings offer vibrant portraits of objects that exemplify the casually quotidian in acrylic and spray paint. She covers her canvases with a painterly hodgepodge of commodity items such as fruit, cigarettes, junk food, and objects of New York’s day-to-day that float against richly colored, striking backgrounds that themselves seem to push forward and demand the viewer’s attention. The patterns emerge without source material, purely from the artist’s thoughts and imagination, and driven by her experiences. With this in mind, the pieces become part of a larger portrait of the artist herself to be pieced together by the viewer. The often times random assortment of objects relate to one another in a way that is presumably deeply personal to Bernhardt herself.
In FRUIT SALAD, Bernhardt will pair a massive still life with the urban landscape of downtown Los Angeles, a location and environment ideal for a large-scale and amplified version of her already bold imagery and exciting painting style.
ABOUT KATHERINE BERNHARDT
Katherine Bernhardt (b. 1975, St Louis, MO) has exhibited her work internationally and throughout the United States, with recent exhibitions at China Art Objects, Los Angeles; CANADA, New York; Roberto Paradise, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Loyal Gallery, Malmo, Sweden; and Carbon12, Dubai, UAE. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Carl Freedman Gallery, London, UK. Katherine Bernhardt holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, and BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
For further information about the exhibition and availability, please contact the gallery at info@venusovermanhattan.com
For all press inquiries related to the exhibition, please email press@venusovermanhattan.com
Despite her having just closed three concurrent solo shows at the New York and L.A. locales of Venus (formerly Venus Over Manhattan and Venus Over Los Angeles) and Carl Freedman, the long, narrow space is bursting at the seams with brightly colored, electric paintings of watermelons, sharks, and bananas.
A Los Angeles gallery gets a new look, thanks to Katherine Bernhardt’s Fruit Salad mural
Venus Over Los Angeles presents, Katherine Bernhardt: Fruit Salad, a large mural covering the exterior walls of the L.A. gallery; a public iteration of her signature wildly colorful still life patterned paintings.
Katherine Bernhardt‘s Fruit Salad, while certainly a feast for the eyes, isn’t necessarily the kind of summer treat you’d want to eat.
Inspired by her frequent residencies in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the city’s colorful La Perla slums, the artist Katherine Bernhardt recently shifted the focus of her object-based paintings.