The Power of Abstract Figuration

An Artist Talk with Katherine Bradford

The Power of Abstract Figuration: An Artist Talk with Katherine Bradford
In conversation with Chloe Stead
11:00 am
 
In her mysterious figurative compositions and luminous swaths of color, Katherine Bradford skillfully combines the traditions of abstraction and color field painting with contemporary questions of identity and gender. By placing her abstract, often androgynous figures in dreamlike and otherworldly settings, she dives into the depths, as she says, of “who we are, how we fit in, how we look and interact with one another.” Join Bradford and frieze Associate Editor Chloe Stead for a conversation about the artist’s long-standing interest in the tensions between intimacy, isolation, empathy, and dependency and her exhibition “ALLTAG” at Haverkampf Leistenschneider, where a new suite of paintings explores the contrasting states of weightlessness and being bound by gravity.
In bright color-field paintings, Katherine Bradford (b. 1942, New York) often depicts motifs including floating figures, swimmers, flying supermen and -women, couples, and suited men surrounded by planets, houses, and beaches. These figures often seem vulnerable, awkward, and exposed, with Bradford’s paintings drawing their atmospheric, metaphorical power from a playful engagement with emotion and humor. Bradford had solo institutional exhibitions at Kunsthalle Emden, Germany; Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Austria; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR; and The Modern Museum of Fort Worth, TX, among others. Her work is held in public collections including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Hirschhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Musee D’Art Moderne de Paris; Baltimore Museum, MD; and Kunsthalle Emden, Germany.

Chloe Stead is an art critic, writer and editor based in Berlin. As Associate Editor at frieze, she commissions and oversees digital content. Her freelance writing on art and culture has appeared in publications including The Financial Times, Spike Art Quarterly, Artnet, AnOther Magazine, and Monocle. She is also a regular contributor to artist monographs and has participated in or moderated talks at Damien & the Love Guru, Brussels; Vienna Contemporary; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof; and Migros Museum, Zurich, among others.

Price info: plus admission

Next date:

• Date Sunday, 03/May/2026 11:00 bis 12:00
• Venue Neue Nationalgalerie
• Address Potsdamer Straße 50, 10785 Berlin-Tiergarten