Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Katherine Bernhardt is not the artist you think you know. Her exuberant canvases, bursting with tangy colors and images drawn from our consumerist world, are not just playful arrangements of pop objects. No, what Bernhardt delivers to us is a joyful deconstruction of aesthetic hierarchies, a chromatic jubilation that blasts artistic conventions with a deliberate nonchalance that hides an unsuspected depth. This Missouri native, considered by some as the “bad girl” of contemporary art, defies easy categorization; she is neither fully pop, nor completely abstract, nor truly figurative. She occupies a unique pictorial territory, a space where chaos reigns supreme but where every element mysteriously finds its place.
In her studio in St. Louis, this artist has developed a pictorial approach that some would call chaotic, others liberating. Bernhardt works like a force of nature, a colorful storm that crashes onto the canvas with an almost meteorological energy. Before her enormous canvases laid on the floor, some measuring up to ten meters long, like the one shown at Art Basel Unlimited in 2018, she sprays rough outlines of watermelons, cigarettes, Pink Panthers, or hammerhead sharks, before pouring diluted acrylic that spreads, runs, and forms multicolored puddles. She does not fight accidents; she causes them, welcomes them, dances with them. Water becomes her essential accomplice, as she herself confides: “I love water in my paintings. Water works on my paintings for me, and transforms them.” This collaboration with the elements, this acceptance of randomness, gives her works an almost atmospheric dimension, as if we were watching a strange meteorological phenomenon rather than a painting.
This method evokes what Georges Bataille calls in Inner Experience the “sovereignty,” that part of existence that escapes utilitarian rationality and surrenders to play, to unproductive expenditure. “I can’t paint something useful,” Bernhardt seems to tell us through her works where Doritos, watermelon pieces, and cellphones are piled haphazardly, like in a chaotic supermarket stall after an earthquake. For Bataille, sovereignty is that part of us that defies established order, that refuses submission to productive ends. Bernhardt’s paintings precisely celebrate this sovereignty, this unbridled freedom that frees itself from the constraints of “good painting” [1].
Bernhardt’s approach also recalls what Susan Sontag described in her Notes on Camp as a sensibility that “sees everything in quotation marks” and values what is “good because it is horrible” [2]. There is something undeniably kitsch in the way Bernhardt appropriates these trinkets of consumerist kitsch, Crocs, Pac-Man, E.T., Garfield, watermelons, smartphones, to transform them into a true pictorial carnival. These totems of our consumerist contemporaneity, she tears them from their banality to breathe a new, explosive, vibrant life into them. She does not merely depict these objects, she orchestrates their delirious parade in a space devoid of visual or symbolic hierarchy. In this joyful visual mess, a Xanax bar can rub shoulders with a cartoon character, a bag of Doritos can float next to a cigarette or a hammerhead shark, all treated with the same formal enthusiasm, the same chromatic jubilation. It is precisely this absence of hierarchy that gives her work its deeply contemporary dimension, reflecting a world where traditional categories collapse, where distinctions between high and low culture fade away.
But make no mistake: behind the apparent technical carelessness lies consummate mastery of the medium. As her gallerist Phil Grauer points out: “People are simply captivated by her fervor and admire how her works are both intrinsically imperfect and intrinsically beautiful, painted with perfect mastery.” This tension between mastery and letting go imparts her works with a raw energy that immediately captivates.
Unlike so many contemporary artists who laboriously build a theoretical discourse around their works, Bernhardt stubbornly refuses to intellectualize her practice. She states this unequivocally in an interview for Artspace in 2015: “I think good painting doesn’t need all that. I think the best painters don’t intellectualize their own art, they just make things. It’s more about color choices and color combinations.” This stance is not a mere provocation, but a genuine artistic ethic. She rejects the pompous discourses that often surround contemporary art, preferring to stick to the essentials: color, form, matter.
When asked why she paints everyday objects, she answers with disarming simplicity: “They have good colors and good shapes. Toilet paper is a square oval. A cigarette is a line. A dorsal fin is a triangle, just like a Dorito.” This formal, almost naive approach that reduces objects to their elemental visual characteristics reveals a view of extraordinary freshness on our image-saturated world. Bernhardt possesses what writer Milan Kundera called “the wisdom of uncertainty,” that ability to see the world without the filter of preconceived ideas, ready-made theories.
Bernhardt’s painting also reminds us of what Maurice Blanchot called “the literary space,” a place where things are freed from their utility, where they exist in pure presence. In The Literary Space, Blanchot writes that art “is not the reality of things, but their metamorphosis, their magnified unreality, their retreat towards the purity of their essence” [3]. Isn’t this exactly what Bernhardt does when she tears everyday objects from their functional context to propel them into the pictorial space? A Garfield, in her canvases, is no longer a comic book character, but becomes a vibrant orange blotch, a pure sign, disconnected from its initial meaning.
This radical decontextualization also reminds me of the writings of the Italian Italo Calvino in La Machine Littérature, where he talks about literature’s ability to “defamiliarize” everyday objects, to make them visible again by tearing them away from their banality [4]. After seeing watermelons, sharks, or bags of chips so often, we no longer truly see them. By painting them with this strange combination of precision and approximation, Bernhardt forces us to look at them again, to rediscover their fundamental strangeness.
Some critics have seen in her works a commentary on American consumerism. That is possible, but Bernhardt herself rejects this too obvious reading. “Maybe,” she says when suggested an ecological interpretation of her sharks swimming among rolls of toilet paper. What is certain is that her paintings capture the contemporary experience in all its visual cacophony and information overload. In a world where we are constantly bombarded with images, logos, and goods, Bernhardt absorbs this chaos and transcribes it onto her canvases with a frenetic energy that evokes our own daily experience.
Art critic Christopher Knight wrote that her paintings show “a world flooded by the heaven and hell of consumer products.” This phrase perfectly captures the ambivalence aroused by her canvases: they celebrate the colorful vitality of our material culture while suggesting the alienating frenzy of our relationship with objects. There is something deeply American in this tension between wonder and critique, between fascination and distance.
Italo Calvino, again, spoke in American Lessons of the essential qualities of the literature of the future: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity [5]. Could one not say that Bernhardt’s paintings precisely embody these qualities? The lightness in her fluid and watery touch, the quickness in her energetic execution, the exactitude in her synthesis of forms, the visibility in her brilliant colors, and the multiplicity in her juxtaposition of disparate elements.
Her working method itself is one of multiplicity: Bernhardt is a compulsive collector, a gatherer of images and references, an insatiable absorber of visual culture. She is constantly on the move, physically and intellectually. As she herself says: “I am a workaholic and I don’t stop until I am exhausted.” This frenetic energy is found in her painting, in these compositions that always seem on the verge of exploding, of overflowing the frame.
From her travels in Morocco, where she imports Berber rugs for her shop Magic Flying Carpets (a commercial venture parallel to her artistic career), to her stays in Puerto Rico, where she bought a brutalist house in San Juan, she absorbs the chromatic and formal influences of diverse cultures. This nomadism is not just a simple taste for exoticism, but a true working method, a way to constantly feed her visual imagination. Her pink house in St. Louis, which became famous after a New York Times report, is itself an extension of her pictorial universe: a total environment where artworks, vintage furniture, found objects, and colorful textiles accumulate.
Her saturated palette evokes African fabrics as much as the colors of the Caribbean, while her approach to repetitive patterns recalls batik fabrics and Moroccan rugs. This personal geography, this emotional mapping is found in her canvases: a space where the boundaries between cultures fade, where references mix freely, creating a new visual esperanto that speaks to everyone regardless of origin, age, or social background.
In her own words: “I always try to paint the most obvious, the most overlooked things, and to make them funny or lively in my paintings.” This quest for the transfigured banal is at the heart of her approach. Like Duchamp’s ready-mades, her paintings invite us to reconsider our relationship with everyday objects, but with a sensuality and exuberance that the master of conceptual art did not have.
Katherine Bernhardt is undoubtedly one of the few artists who manages to capture the spirit of our time without falling into cynicism or nostalgia. She does not lament the consumer society; she celebrates it while transfiguring it. She does not mourn the loss of meaning; she creates new meaningful constellations from the cultural debris that surrounds us. And above all, she never takes herself too seriously, a rare quality in the contemporary art world.
Her paintings remind us of what Susan Sontag wrote in Against Interpretation: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” [6]. Bernhardt’s canvases are precisely that: a direct sensory experience, a chromatic assault that short-circuits our tendency to overinterpret. They invite us to surrender to the pure pleasure of color and form, to rediscover a playful and sensual relationship with the images that populate our daily lives.
Perhaps this is where the truly subversive strength of her work lies: in its ability to re-enchant our relationship with the material world, to infuse joy and strangeness into our interactions with the most banal objects. She deconstructs aesthetic hierarchies not through theoretical discourse, but through the very act of painting, through this democratic gesture that puts E.T., a bag of Doritos, and a watermelon on the same level.
Her series of paintings on E.T., presented in her exhibition “Done with Xanax” at the Canada gallery in 2019, is emblematic of this approach. The title itself plays on the ambiguity between personal reference and commentary on contemporary pharmaceutical culture. By painting this iconic character of 1980s popular culture, Bernhardt is not simply indulging in nostalgia; she creates a bridge between her childhood and our present saturated with medication, anxiety, and refuge in pop culture. As her sister Elizabeth wrote in a text accompanying the exhibition: “Katherine and E.T. have a lot in common… Growing up in the suburbs, she immediately identified with E.T., who himself landed in a suburban setting and couldn’t understand how to escape while suffering great existential pain.”
In an art world often dominated by austere conceptualism or didactic social commentary, Bernhardt reminds us that art can be both critical and pleasurable, complex and accessible, sophisticated and immediate. She achieves this rare feat: creating works that speak both to children and savvy collectors, to novices and seasoned critics. This universality is not the result of cynical calculation but of fundamental authenticity, of fidelity to her personal vision that transcends the usual divides of the art world.
So stop looking for hidden messages in these Pink Panthers and watermelon slices. Instead, let yourself be overwhelmed by the chromatic wave, by this tsunami of tangy colors that annihilates the hierarchies between high and low culture. Because if Bernhardt’s art tells us something, it is that contemporary life is a joyful chaos, and our only possible response is to embrace this colorful anarchy with a liberating laugh.
- Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience. Paris: Gallimard, 1943.
- Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.
- Blanchot, Maurice. The Literary Space. Paris: Gallimard, 1955.
- Calvino, Italo. The Literature Machine. Paris: Seuil, 1993.
- Calvino, Italo. American Lessons: Memorandum for the Next Millennium. Paris: Gallimard, 1989.
- Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.
