KATHERINE BRADFORD: LIVING A DREAM

GALLERY HYUNDAI is pleased to present Living a Dream, the first solo exhibition of Katherine Bradford (b. 1942).

May 27 – July 12, 2026

Bradford is widely regarded as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American painting today. Her recurring figures, such as mothers, swimmers, and superheroes, drift through boundless spaces of water, outer space, and night, evoking both the vulnerability of human existence and the complexities of relationships. Through compositions where the everyday intersects with the transcendent, Bradford has long explored the solitude and exhilaration of being human. Her dreamlike yet deeply resonant palette, along with her fluid movement between abstraction and figuration, are among the defining characteristics of her practice. The exhibition title, Living a Dream, encapsulates Bradford’s signature floating figures and dreamlike colors. Featuring approximately 20 recent paintings, the exhibition offers a broad survey of the central motifs and emotional sensibilities that define her oeuvre.

Born in New York in 1942, Bradford entered her full artistic career after raising a family in Maine and relocating to New York in 1979. As part of the first generation of artists to establish themselves in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, then far from the center of the art world’s attention, she has spent decades building a singular painterly language, working continuously in the same studio to this day. After the 1970s, in the American art scene, a broader shift emerged away from the all-encompassing perspective of pure abstraction toward more fluid explorations of the boundary between abstraction and figuration. Bradford developed her own visual language within this context, in dialogue with her contemporaries. While inheriting aspects of the abstract language of earlier painters such as Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, she expanded those legacies in her own way. Drawing on a deep engagement with materiality and color, she also absorbed the late figurative turn of Philip Guston and the meditative chromatic abstraction of Mark Rothko, ultimately forging a distinct artistic vocabulary of her own. Her fluid interplay between abstraction and figuration, paired with a focus on vulnerability and inner emotional life, gradually brought her international recognition from the 2000s onward. Her 2022 solo exhibition, Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford at the Portland Museum of Art, marked a significant moment in her broader reappraisal as a major figure in contemporary painting.

Although Bradford paints intuitively, without preparatory sketches or reference images, her works are not completed in a single gesture but emerge slowly through extended observation and repeated adjustment. Built up over months, sometimes years, her canvases consist of multiple thin, semi-transparent layers of acrylic, with traces of revision and overpainting subtly embedded in the final surface. In this way, her paintings accumulate the artist’s thoughts, gestures, and time, creating a palpable sense of vitality, as though the canvas were breathing. Her figures often appear in familiar settings such as swimming pools, the sea, beds, or domestic interiors, yet simultaneously seem to float free from gravity, blur into one another, or inhabit atmospheres that feel surreal and cosmic. Though their faces often remain indistinct, the figures appear connected to one another while also inhabiting a state of fundamental solitude. Through them, Bradford delicately captures the layered emotional complexity of human experience.

At the heart of the exhibition are Bradford’s iconic swimming figures. The layered accumulations of color, along with marks that have been erased and retained, dissolve the boundaries between figure and background, creating a luminous effect as though the paintings emit light from within, alongside a translucent sense of spatial depth. Suspended in water, these figures occupy a liminal space between the real and the imagined, revealing both existential instability and emotional openness. They embody the poetic sensitivity and psychological depth that characterize Bradford’s work. Also featured are key paintings such as Mothers Group (2025), which explores the complex emotional terrain of relationships and caregiving; Sleep and Pool Swimmer (2024), which examines the boundary between reality and dreams while revealing the grandeur and mystery embedded in the everyday; and Greeting the Sun (2023), which evokes hope and interior emotional states through the imagery of sunlight and illumination. Together, these works reveal Bradford’s distinctive emotional landscapes, where humor and melancholy, intimacy and solitude coexist.