Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by Javier Romero
THE SUPERSTAR NEXT DOOR Written by Craig Kaminer / Photos courtesy Katherine Bernhardt
When you grow up in New York City like I did, it’s possible to live your whole life there and never really know your neighbors. But since I have lived in St. Louis since 1988, I say hello to people on the streets, work hard at getting to know my neighbors, and make a concerted effort to find out who the people are that I see regularly. Recently, my friend Wendy Crowell, who writes an art column in each issue (page 20), asked if I knew Katherine Bernhardt. Truthfully, I had heard some buzz from friends but never realized how big of a deal she is...or that she has moved back to St. Louis. Like you, I know a number of artists and the majority of the more successful ones here sell their work for $10,000 to $15,000 (at most) for a painting. In comparison, Katherine’s work starts at $100,000 for a 5 ft. by 4 ft. canvas and goes up from there. And she’s represented by David Zwirner, who is arguably the market maker for top Contemporary artists such as Joan Mitchell, Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin. So I was delighted to see that Ronnie Greenberg, the St. Louis gallery legend, was going to have a show of Katherine’s recent work at his eponymous gallery and even more delighted to meet Katherine in person. The night of the opening, the gallery was filled with collectors and gallerists alike, with the most notable being Greenberg’s superstar daughter, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who now is a mainstay of the Gotham social scene. Since the opening, I have bumped into Katherine at other openings (William Shearburn’s Robert Motherwell show) and Katherine agreed to do an interview with me for Sophisticated Living. Our first scheduled time had to be postponed due to Katherine contracting COVID, but a week or so later we met via Zoom. Our conversation ranged from what it was like growing up in St. Louis, her various stages as an artist, life in New York City and being discovered, and her recent decision to return to her hometown of St. Louis. While she may not stand out in a NYC art opening and look the part of an artist, Katherine does here. Her funky glasses, 28 slmag.net
whimsical sweatshirts, puffy down coat, bright sneakers, and oneof-a-kind giggle is the first tip-off. She’s fun, irreverent, and a total original. If she weren’t a wildly successful world-class artist whose works are being collected globally, she would just be the kooky (in a good way) person next door. Bernhardt’s boundless visual appetite has established her as one of the most energetic painters working today. She first attracted notice in the early 2000s for her paintings of supermodels taken straight from the pages of fashion magazines such as Elle and Vogue. In the decade following, she began making pattern paintings that featured an ever-expanding list of quotidian motifs. Tacos, coffee makers, toilet paper, cigarettes, E.T., Garfield, Darth Vader, and the Pink Panther make unlikely visual combinations within expansive fields of exuberant color. She takes pleasure in variety, and fully investigates each of her obsessions before moving to another. Bernhardt’s trust in the fundamental underpinnings of painting gives her the freedom to depict anything she wants, and the democratizing surfaces of her canvases work without illusion, perspective, logical scale shifts, or atmosphere. With Bernhardt’s blunt yet lyrical approach, each painting has the feel of a complete thought that engages the artist’s rich and raucous free association. Since she has moved here, she has bought three buildings in Midtown -- one for her studio, the other as a gallery and storage to show works from artists from St. Louis and friends from her travels, and the other as a big, raw space which currently features the large work of Jose Luis Vargas from Puerto Rico. She’s a one-woman art machine, warehousing many of her works from years past, working on major commissions in partnership with the likes of brands such as Chanel, J Crew and Marc Jacobs, and promoting artists she feels have the chops to make it big. As she continues to work on these three studio/gallery spaces, she and her son, Khalifa, are living in her childhood home in Clayton. With plans to buy a home soon, she seems equally comfortable in her childhood bedroom and disturbed by it at the same time. I guess living with that kind of tension comes with the life of an artist. Before achieving critical acclaim, Katherine started painting in high school, in the very bedroom in which she now lives, and she knew then that being an artist was what she wanted to do. She had
