Neonfarbblendluminanzwuchtgemaeldenetzhautkollisionsgefahr

The first institutional exhibition in Europe dedicated to the US-American painter Katherine Bernhardt presents a comprehensive overview of her recent work. With her large-scale, vibrantly colored paintings, Bernhardt has established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary painting. The title of Katherine Bernhardt’s exhibition, Neonfarbblendluminanzwuchtgemaeldenetzhautkollisionsgefahr, consists of fifty-eight letters combining the individual elements essential to the exhibition concept and artistic approach, in German, into a single unit: Neon – Color – Blinding – Luminance – Force – Painting – Retina – Collision – Hazard. At the same time, the title functions as a gesture of linguistic overload and as a condensation of a logic of sensory experience: It describes less than it affects, and points to a production of images that directly targets perception, stimulus intensity, and visual superimposition. The juxtaposition of these terms generates a kind of continuous semantic current that translates the logic of her painting — characterized by the superimposition and proximity of signs, as well as by impulsive intensity and simultaneity — into a radically open language.

Bernhardt’s work operates at the intersection of Pop Art, Neo-Expressionism, and post-digital painting. She draws on the strategies of 1960s Pop Art, as developed by artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg, translating their visual vocabularies into a subjective and expressive contemporary language. Unlike the calculated detachment of classical Pop Art, Bernhardt’s paintings are characterized by gestural immediacy, spontaneity, and a deliberately imperfect openness. Her work also reveals affinities with the Neo-Expressionism of the 1980s. At the same time, the paintings’ emphatic use of color and their physical, sensual presence reveal connections that reach even further back — to the space-defining colors of Henri Matisse or the still lifes from Giorgio Morandi’s concentrated visual world. Bernhardt, too, uses everyday objects not primarily for their symbolic meaning, but as a starting point for painterly explorations. Her motifs follow the dynamics of the act of painting itself rather than a predetermined iconographic program. In her paintings, Bernhardt also pays homage to the work of contemporary artists she admires, such as Alex Katz, Mary Heilmann, Laura Owens, and Josh Smith.