Online Exhibition

Utopia Editions: Katherine Bradford

This presentation debuts two etchings by Katherine Bradford, each available in a limited edition of 25, featuring the artist’s signature figures and vibrant, luminous compositions.

Created using aquatint techniques, the works evoke an atmospheric, watercolor-like quality, capturing the nuanced tonal shifts that define Bradford’s celebrated paintings.

Katherine Bradford at Harlan & Weaver, New York, 2024. Photo by Vincent Tullo

The artist works directly on the copper plate using the sugar lift aquatint technique to delineate each figure and establish the rich background. Photo by Vincent Tullo

Photo by Vincent Tullo

 

Katherine Bradford, Woman Holding Woman, 2024 (detail)

Photo by Vincent Tullo

Video of Katherine Bradford, Woman Holding Woman, 2024

Bradford is known for her meditative, figural works that seem to radiate light, recalling the prominently rendered figures of Marsden Harley and the luminous colors of Mark Rothko in scenes that feel both ambiguous and sharply personal.

Woman Holding Woman depicts two women in colorful dresses, one holding the other high above her head in a spirit of collaboration and strength. The resulting scene is strange yet tender; its multivalent and symbolic meaning is emphasized by its descriptive title, which may also allude to pressing contemporary concerns—namely, the ongoing assault on women’s rights.

Katherine Bradford, Woman Holding Woman, 2025

“I like seeing how these two divers are mysteriously covered by a second set of colors once they’ve plunged into the water. It’s the experience of the transparency that I was after in this print.”

—Katherine Bradford

In her Brooklyn studio, Bradford finishes each print with hand-painted acrylic details, bringing the water, figures, and horizon line to life with subtle, unique variations within each print.

Video of Katherine Bradford, Divers, 2024 (detail)

Bradford adds hand-painted details to an impression of Divers.

In Divers, Bradford portrays two of her signature swimsuit-clad figures diving into a pool of swirling green water, their heads and torsos obscured beneath the surface. This strange yet intimate scene reflects the artist’s ongoing exploration of transparency and the evocative image of the human body in water.

After the background and figures were printed, Bradford meticulously painted each print with acrylic paint, rendering the water and adding highlights to the figures and horizon line. As a result, each impression is unique.

Katherine Bradford, Divers, 2024

Details from paintings by Katherine Bradford showcasing her iconic swimmer motif, featuring figures partly in, partly out of water. Courtesy of the artist

A recurring motif in the artist’s work, Bradford’s figures in water were most recently part of the exhibition Katherine Bradford: Sky Swimmers at the Kunsthalle Emden in Germany.

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About the Artist

Katherine Bradford (b. 1942, New York; lives and works in New York and Maine) is known for her enigmatic canvases that place characters, including mothers, superheroes, and swimmers, in abstract fields of saturated and sumptuous color. Her buoyant, luminous compositions feature dreamy and otherworldly settings such as outer space or the open sea.

Bradford has had recent solo exhibitions at CANADA, New York; Kaufmann Repetto, Milan; and Tomio Koyama, Tokyo. She has had recent solo museum exhibitions at Halle für Kunst Graz, Austria; Kunsthalle Emden, Germany; and Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin.

Bradford has participated in two-person exhibitions at Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University. Recent group exhibitions include David Zwirner, New York; Museum MORE, Gorssel, Netherlands; the FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Pilar Corrias, London; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; Zillman Art Museum, Bangor, Maine; and Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California. In 2022, Bradford’s work was the subject of a survey exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, which traveled to the Frye Art Museum, Seattle.

Bradford’s work is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Aïshti Collection, Beirut; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University; Dallas Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; Menil Collection, Houston; and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami.

Bradford is represented by CANADA, New York; Kaufmann Repetto, Milan; Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oregon; Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin; and Tomio Koyama, Tokyo.