In the promotional film for Katherine Bernhardt’s Peanut Butter and Jelly exhibition, there are stacks and rows of paintings, bright and bold, kind of messy, but deliberately so. There is a magic to this work, domestic scenes that are broken down, enlightened, fluorescented, cartooned, embraced again and reimagined as fine art. I will say I’m a huge fan of the work, especially (I mean, no shit), when seen in person, as there is a skill that Bernhardt has to make work radiate, to be alive, to make it silly but seriously intended and seriously constructed.
For CANADA, there is an abundance and its active. She has honed in on her home, whether its plants, sponges, food, appliances, and filtered them through her lens. The pop-cultural references, the universal language of daily life and iconography, is always there. Her thick, gestural brushstrokes, saturated colors, and cropped compositions flatten and fragment familiar imagery until it teeters on abstraction, yet that very roughness breathes new life into the banal. The repetition, scale shifts, and playful palette turn disposable motifs into vivid visual rhythms, so that what began as ordinary ephemera is transfigured into something unexpectedly beautiful, exuberant, and oddly intimate.
Her use of spray paint, not coming from graffiti but mostly from an industrious, utilitarian-meets-technicolor, could be described as a house-painter given acid and remembering his childhood room. There would be an innocence but also an intent to get the memory right. That is how I feel with a Bernhardt work, and the new show tackles my favorite childhood snack. There are levels here. —Evan Pricco
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