8 minute read
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 an NYC art opening and look the part of an artist, Katherine does here. Her funky glasses, whimsical sweatshirts, puffy down coat, bright sneakers, and one-of-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.
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 very clear ideas of what she was doing, regardless of what people thought of the art or her. She remembers going to Washington University’s portfolio day, applying to and getting into The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and never looking back. From there, she received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2000.
While there were many years between graduate school and her first big sales, she did what most committed artists do. She started working in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, then moved to a tiny studio in Manhattan on Christie Street, and then moved to Murray Hill. Then later, she moved back to Brooklyn and had a studio with no heat or hot water in Flatbush. “It wasn’t glamorous at all, but I was working with so many talented artists -- all of us struggling to get noticed.”
Her first break was when Team Gallery -- which was founded in SoHo -- opened a gallery in Chelsea. They were one of, if not the first, galleries in Chelsea around 2000. “It was a really cool and under-developed area but I knew it was the place to be,” she says. “After Team Gallery, I went with Canada Gallery, which a friend (Brendan Cass) took me to one day. I thought it was cool and open, so I sent them slides and asked them over to my studio. They called and decided to do a studio visit which was in the corner of my apartment at the time. We agreed to do a show then.” She has been with them ever since.
Today, Bernhardt’s work is in demand and she has been able to remain with Canada Gallery while also joining the ranks of one of the world’s most powerful dealers, David Zwirner. Zwirner will represent Bernhardt in London, Paris, Hong Kong, New York, and Los Angeles.
Through her index of images, from childhood sticker books to a ketchup bottle seen during travel, Bernhardt chronicles her life and the broader culture, synthesizing her visual material with hard-won ease. Her influences span from Henri Matisse and the Pattern and Decoration movement to Peter Doig, Morris Louis, Mary Heilman, Laura Owens, Alex Katz, and Chris Ofili. She is an artist’s artist, admired by many contemporary peers working today as a singular voice in painting.
In a palette that ranges from restrained to vivid Day-Glo, Bernhardt paints the canvases face up on her studio floor, employing spray paint, puddles of thinned-out acrylic, and utilitarian brushwork to emphasize aspects of her motifs. Bernhardt’s process is improvisational and loose, at times inviting accident and chance into the works, as well as asserting an equal relationship between artist and material. It’s hard to imagine that her simple spray-painted images of these subjects are fetching more than $100,000 per painting, but as is the case with many artists, once they are recognizable with a list of impressive galleries and collectors, there’s no turning back. Perhaps it’s the time we live in when affluent people want to collect art, but this has probably been true since gallerists like Leo Castelli first gave Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Frank Stella their big breaks.
As Katherine explains it, “I knew I never wanted to do anything else. I knew with persistence, working all the time, hustle, and innovating, I wasn’t going to stop until I made it.”
Bernhardt admits that she was very bored growing up in St. Louis, spending hours looking at Swatch watches and Esprit designs at the malls, and reading lots of magazines. “All of these things became part of my art,” she says. Ironically, she’s back in St. Louis and now New York is a turnoff in some ways. “I hate Hudson Yards and the Vessel, and those types of developments with no character. Life with my son in New York was a hassle, not to mention that he had the same teacher for three years in a row and then my studio lease ran out. It also didn’t hurt that my sister moved back to St. Louis from Italy and I wanted to be near her,” she explains.
Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by Javier Romero
“My big breaks came from being critically reviewed. My first big break was in the Village Voice review during my years at Team Gallery. After that there were two New York Times reviews in a row, and my work really started to sell. I started showing at Xavier Hufkens, then art fairs and more recently Zwirner.”
“Life is so much easier now in St. Louis. I have my first car, Khalifa plays outside, and he can go anywhere. But for most artists who want to do what I did, they need to be in New York. You need to show where the majority of collectors are.”
What’s next for the St. Louis-based art phenom? “I’m working on a long-term project of building a house in Puerto Rico; it’s already seven years into the making,” she says. “I am the artist ambassador to Greenpeace, have a show with Zwirner in London in 2022, Art Basel Miami with Canada Gallery and Zwirner, and a print coming out with Counter Editions of Scotch Tape. But, I am not going anywhere until Khalifa finishes high school. Hopefully I can help attract more artists to St. Louis. We need more coffee shops and especially a matcha shop. Artists need more places to meet other artists.”
Some of the artists she likes in St. Louis and has featured at her gallery, Dragon, Crab and Turtle, include Philip Slein (another gallerist), Ashley Colangelo, Bianco Fields and Vaughn Davis Jr.
So, when she’s not painting, curating shows for Dragon, Crab and Turtle, or traveling, you may be able to find her at one of her favorite restaurants, Olympia Restaurant on McCausland Ave. Why there I asked? “It’s delicious!” she says with her sly Image courtesy of the artist. smile and signature laugh.
