Katherine Bernhardt Lets Cartoons, Perfume and Mushrooms Share One Canvas

Katherine Bernhardt at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark in Graz

Pink Panther, Garfield, Crocs and mushrooms. In Katherine Bernhardt's paintings, almost anything can end up sharing a canvas.

At HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark in Graz, around forty works bring together familiar cartoon characters, everyday objects and explosive colour.

Curated by Sandro Droschl, Neonfarbblendluminanzwuchtgemaeldenetzhautkollisionsgefahr
runs until January 10, 2027.

Katherine Bernhardt shows about forty paintings from recent years in Neonfarbblendluminanzwuchtgemaeldenetzhautkollisionsgefahr at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark in Graz, curated by Sandro Droschl and on view through January 10, 2027.

The title is one German compound of 58 letters, built from the words Neon, Farbe, Blenden, Luminanz, Wucht, Gemälde, Netzhaut, Kollision and Gefahr. The canvases are painted directly with spray paint and acrylic, and they set Pink Panther, Garfield and Pac-Man beside sneakers, Crocs, cigarettes, mushrooms and toilet paper rolls.

The venue calls it the first institutional exhibition in Europe devoted to the painter, who was born in 1975 in St. Louis, Missouri, and lives there. Below, curator Sandro Droschl explains how the title and the paintings fit together.

Curatorial Text by Sandro Droschl

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 compositions first and foremost follow the dynamics of the act of painting.

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.

Bernhardt’s pictorial worlds are shaped by globally circulating visual systems: comics, cartoons, advertising, fashion, and digital media intersect with motifs drawn from everyday life and consumer culture.

Characters such as Pink Panther, Garfield, Pac-Man, or those from the Pokémon universe encounter sneakers, Crocs, cigarettes, mushrooms, or toilet paper rolls.

In seemingly spontaneous constellations, the artist combines motifs that appear unrelated at first glance, creating visual spaces that are at once humorous and unsettling.

Executed directly with spray paint and acrylic on canvas, Bernhardt’s works reject perspective, illusion, and atmospheric depth. Instead, they unfold as open pictorial fields in which pop aesthetics, consumer culture, and personal associations overlap. The repeated use of certain figures and objects simultaneously evokes serial image production and strategies of Appropriation Art.

Yet Bernhardt continually subverts any rigid system through her intuitive and almost improvisational compositions. Her paintings emerge from a remarkably fast and immediate creative process. Given the speed with which she develops her paintings, connections often arise spontaneously and organically from the material itself. Not every decision is the result of theoretical deliberation—many are, above all, painterly decisions.

Balancing irony, sensory overload, and playful lightness, her works generate a distinctive ambivalence: familiar consumer images shift into the surreal, while humorous motifs acquire an underlying darker tone. Each painting appears as a self-contained visual thought that sets off a chain of free associations.

The exhibition presents a selection of key works from recent years and offers insight into Bernhardt’s unmistakable visual language through a carefully conceived exhibition parcours. It provides a comprehensive perspective on an artist whose work combines the expressive freedom of painting with the visual codes of global popular culture.