Tomio Koyama Gallery is pleased to present “Flight Over Water Town”, a solo exhibition by American artist Katherine Bradford.
Katherine Bradford has garnered international recognition for her distinctive approach to painting. Her work has been showcased in major solo exhibitions worldwide, including the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, United States (2022) and Halle für Kunst, Graz, Austria (2024). This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, following her 2022 exhibition “Night Swimmers.”
In this new body of work, Bradford presents fifteen paintings that exemplify her striking yet elusive compositions, which has earned her widespread acclaim. Figures emerge mid-motion – swimming, dancing, walking, flying or resting – set against luminous fields of color where sea, sky, and land meet in vivid, dreamlike horizons. These scenes, while reminiscent of fleeting moments from daily life or cinematic fragments, resist clear narrative or interpretation. The figures, with their abstracted anatomies and faces, elude precise identification, yet their ambiguous gestures invite viewers into an intimate space of curiosity and recognition.
The exhibition title, “Flight Over Water Town” – shared with one of the featured works – captures the essence of recurring motifs in Bradford’s practice: soaring figures and bodies of water. Her airborne figures, evolving from the artist’s celebrated series depicting superhero(ines), infuse the paintings with a sense of buoyancy and a dynamic tension. These figures hover between weightlessness and gravity, freedom and restraint, all while maintaining an undercurrent of whimsy and playfulness. Bradford’s bodies of water – swimming pools, rivers, and the sea – are painted with a unique transparency, achieved through her skillful use of acrylic paint, the artist’s medium of choice. This approach gives her paintings a fluidity that mirrors the transience and ambiguity of her subjects.
This intricate interplay between representation and medium is a defining element of Bradford’s practice, extending beyond her depictions of water to her entire approach to painting. Reflecting on her process, she notes: “I don’t paint from observation. My human beings are closely related to the paint they’re made of. And they’re invented. (Canada “Studio”)”
This perspective can be linked to Bradford’s roots in abstract, gestural painting, and underscores her work, where painted figures and environments are conceived as inseparable from the materiality of paint itself. Through this methodology, Bradford reimagines the boundaries of figuration, creating works that are as much about the act of painting as they are about the worlds they depict.
Bradford’s work also features houses in the Georgian style of 18th-century New England—marked by stout chimneys and neatly aligned windows—that carry a ghostly, floating quality. These spectral homes resonate with Louise Bourgeois’ Femme Maison series, where nude female figures merge with house-like architecture, challenging ideas of femininity and domesticity. Similarly, Bradford uses these images to explore the dynamic between individuality and societal constraints, infusing her imagery with a blend of humor and pathos as her figures navigate boundaries in enigmatic ways.
About the Artist
In an interview, Bradford mentioned how she wakes up every morning grateful for (and a bit surprised with) her life as an artist. While she has currently gained much success and receives acclaim for her work as an artist, her path to arriving at this life had been a difficult one.
Bradford was born in 1942 in New York, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Without formal training, she began creating abstract paintings in her thirties while raising twins, hoping to change her life as a wife of a politician in order to pursue an artistic career. She had moved with her family from New York to the rural state of Maine for her husband who was talking about running for governor, yet there she encountered a community of hippie artists that further ignited her ambitions. There is an anecdote that Bradford, in hopes to escape her current circumstances, literally jumped out the window during a gathering of her husband’s political friends and ran in to her studio, which was in a barn.
After her divorce, Bradford moved to New York City as a single mother to pursue art in closer contact with contemporary painting discourse. She enrolled in graduate studies at State University of New York at Purchase when she was around 40 years old, completing her MFA and meeting her partner of the same sex who she continues to maintain a relationship with. In the subsequent decades she continued to pursue her artistic endeavors, receiving high acclaim for her paintings of the vast ocean, boats, swimmers, and superheroes that she began producing in her sixties, thus finally coming to be widely recognized in the art world.
Maine, home to the city of Portland, is blessed with beautiful bayshore coastlines and rich forests, and is visited by many people who enjoy activities such as swimming and skiing. Bradford currently spends her summers in Maine, and while it was once a place she had been so eager to leave, the images of its ocean and the people who swim there indeed had a significant influence on her work.
Furthermore, Bradford’s brother is an architect as was also her grandfather, and although being blessed by this visual environment her mother had continued to discourage her interest in art. This oppression from her mother had deeply afflicted Bradford, and some viewers find the artist’s mother to be depicted in a comical manner among the swimmers that serve as a key motif of the work.
Considering the times, it would have been much more difficult than today for Bradford to become an artist, abandon her secure position as a politician’s wife, and start a relationship with her same-sex partner. Katherine Bradford had indeed achieved and developed her identity through her very own effort. Her twin children, who in their early age had been puzzled by their mother’s sudden change of environment and decision to live as an artist, now take pride in their mother’s work, bringing much joy to Bradford.
This exhibition celebrates Katherine Bradford’s remarkable journey and visionary artistry, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in the worlds of her evocative paintings, soaring as if over Bradford’s water towns.
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