Spring Cleaning

Katherine Bernhardt is known for paintings that merge commercial motifs and imagery from everyday life with loose, expressive mark-making. Her canvases stage dense scenes of pop culture, featuring cartoon characters, brand logos, and household objects—Garfield, the Pink Panther, E.T., Crocs, the Nike swoosh, and cigarettes. Rather than treating these images as symbols to decode, Bernhardt approaches iconography as material to play with, reframe, and exhaust. These forms stack, overlap, and multiply across the canvas, producing crowded compositions of flat, saturated color that reject conventions of perspective and atmospheric depth. She embraces spontaneity through gestural brushwork, using fast-drying materials ranging from thinned acrylic to spray paint. By collapsing distinctions between high art and popular imagery, Bernhardt creates paintings where images from mass culture and everyday life coexist on equal terms. Imperfection, humor, and excess serve as intentional formal strategies that evoke the visual overload characteristic of contemporary culture.

For the High Line’s 18th Street Billboard, Bernhardt presents Spring Cleaning, a painting of a vivid, crowded still life that stages an encounter between domestic labor, consumer goods, and everyday ritual. Cleaning supplies such as paper towel rolls, glass cleaner, Ajax, and dish soap sit atop a packed white kitchen counter alongside bananas, a pot of purple orchids, a stick of butter, a to-go coffee cup, and a fuchsia sink faucet. Rendered in Bernhardt’s signature palette of bright color and assertive brushwork, the composition is unified by a bright pink spray-painted outline, a recurring gesture in her practice. The familiar objects hover between order and chaos, utility and excess. On view in the spring on the High Line, the work resonates with seasonal rituals of renewal while reflecting the challenges of maintaining order within a culture shaped by constant consumption and accumulation.