KATHERINE BERNHARDT

Early Years

Katherine Bernhardt was born in 1975 in Clayton, Missouri. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and went on to complete her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She currently lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri, where she also runs Magic Flying Carpet, an alternative exhibition space.

Initially gaining attention for her fashion-model portrait series, Bernhardt evolved into one of the most distinctive painters of her generation. Her canvases are now populated by eclectic icons of pop culture, from Pink Panther and E.T. to Nike swooshes, Swatch watches and tropical fruit.

Artworks

Katherine Bernhardt’s artworks are known for their loose, expressive style and mash-up of imagery drawn from global consumerism, childhood nostalgia, and digital-age symbolism.

Early Figurative Works and Fashion Portraits

Katherine Bernhardt first attracted attention in the early 2000s for her portraits of fashion models, based on images lifted from glossy magazines. In works such as Elle USA (Kate Moss) (2003), she painted figures with deliberately distorted proportions and expressive brushwork, disrupting the slickness of their source material. These artworks critiqued the beauty standards of the fashion industry while also celebrating their visual excess. Her raw, gestural technique—at times incorporating spray paint or collage—created a deliberate tension between glamour and grunge. This early period laid the groundwork for her lifelong interest in image saturation, cultural fetishism, and painterly experimentation.

Pattern Paintings and Pop Culture Iconography

Bernhardt’s breakthrough came when she began creating paintings populated by repeated icons of mass-produced culture. Objects like cigarettes, plantains, Nike logos, Coca-Cola cans, and Garfield were arranged across vast canvases in riotous patterns. Works such as Slimer, Nike, Plantains (2014) epitomise this phase, combining brand logos, snacks, and tropical fruits in wild, overlapping compositions. Painted with both acrylic and spray paint, these artworks operate like visual inventories of modern life. Bernhardt elevates the banal to the monumental, turning everyday consumer goods into the building blocks of abstract expression. Her canvases reflect the chaotic beauty—and absurdity—of a globalised, brand-obsessed culture.

Cartoon Characters and Abstract Energy

In more recent works, Bernhardt has incorporated well-known cartoon characters—Bart Simpson, Pink Panther, E.T., and Darth Vader—into her large-scale compositions. These pop culture icons are painted alongside bananas, laptops, lightbulbs, and tropical foliage in anarchic combinations that defy logical sequencing. Her 2022 mural Watermelon World at MOCA Los Angeles is a prime example, where saturated imagery spills across walls in an immersive, technicolour fever dream. These paintings tap into a collective subconscious shaped by screens, childhood nostalgia, and internet overload. Bernhardt’s expressive mark-making and jarring juxtapositions channel the rhythm of digital culture while maintaining the physical urgency of gestural painting.

Exhibitions

Katherine Bernhardt has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions at important institutions and blue-chip galleries. A selection of important exhibitions are provided below.

Solo Exhibitions

• Dummy doll jealous eyes ditto pikachu beefy mimikyu rough play Galarian rapid dash libra horn HP 270 Vmax full art, David Zwirner, Hong Kong (2023)
• “I’m Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?”, CANADA, New York (2023)
• Garfield on Scotch Tape, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (2019)
• Watermelon World, Mario Testino Museum (MATE), Lima (2018)
• Mural, Project Wall at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2017)
• FOCUS: Katherine Bernhardt, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth (2017)

Group Exhibitions

• A Magical Day at Ditch, Tripoli Gallery of Contemporary Art, Wainscott (2023)
• The Cuteness Factor, Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2023)
• America: Between Dreams and Realities, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington (2022)
• New to the Collection, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2021)
• Global Pop Underground, Nanzuka Parco Museum, Tokyo (2020)
• Feel the Sun in Your Mouth: Recent Acquisitions, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington (2019)
• Manifesta 11: The European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Zurich (2016)
• No Man’s Land, Rubell Collection, Miami (2015)

Instagram

Katherine Bernhart’s Instagram can be found here.

Critical Reception

Katherine Bernhardt’s contemporary art practice has been widely discussed in Cultured Mag, Emergent Mag, and The New York Times Style Magazine.

Katherine Bernhardt FAQs

Ocula | 2025