Katherine Bernhardt

“Budapest – The Gellert Hotel 10:15 PM”
March 23 – May 6, 2006

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present “Budapest – The Gellert Hotel 10:15 PM” an exhibition by American artist Katherine Bernhardt. The exhibition is on from March 23 until May 6.

The exhibition shows entirely new paintings, produced during Katherine Bernhardt’s stay at the gallery’s Project Space in Vienna last year. Most of the images show nudes, whose pale, slightly distorted bodies stand against the dark background. Through her daub and drip way of painting and the partly slipped, partly too tight image-section results an aggressive esthetics, which captivates the observer.

Katherine Bernhardt’s style is mostly described as neo-primitivism or Pop-Expressionism and compared to Kirchner, Picasso and Basquiat. Wild brushstrokes and dripping, vivid colors are used to depict images of men or women set against dark backgrounds. The subjects of her paintings one has seen perhaps too many times before: fashion models, consumer goods, and pop stars. Her approach to it is petulant and skeptical, but nevertheless with a lot of enthusiasm and playfulness.

Katherine Bernhardt was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1975 and lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris (France), Kineko Ivec Gallery, Toronto (Canada), Galeria Comercial, San Juan (Puerto Rico), Canada Gallery, New York, (NY). She has been included in group shows at Modern Culture, New York (NY), Canada Gallery, New York (NY), Canada Gallery, New York (NY), Hales Gallery, London, (England).

Katherine Bernhardt

“Pleasure and Paint”
January 15 – February 21, 2004

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present new paintings by Katherine Bernhardt. This is the 28-year-old painter’s first solo exhibition in Austria.

Bernhardt’s paintings suggest that something new is possible in the pleasure of painterly excess. Like Polke or Kippenberger, they are bold, arrogant, risky and disruptive. Her practice is stridently irreverent. Bernhardt takes advantage of the material hybridity of contemporary painting; she is a master of economy and aggression.

Her most recent work – in which she has narrowed down her choice of materials to acrylic, spray paint, and canvas cutouts – playfully and consciously references the artists she has been looking at most recently: Donald Baechler most obviously, in the canvas cutouts and formal arrangements, but also painters such as Laura Owens and Chris Ofili.

To get an idea of Bernhardt’s position, simply look at her personal iconography, which includes references to the flashy fashion of American rap, pop and sports stars – Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana – all pulled from promotional materials, ads and even magazine articles on the stars themselves.

Bernhardt places herself in a similar dynamic in relation to the fashions of painting. Though a background may, at a glance, seem like a badly executed reference to Pollock, the masterful depth she ultimately achieves is all show business: an unrestrained, performative and completely natural expression.