Paintings

New York–based painter Katherine Bradford (born 1942) creates color-drenched scenes of swimming, water and gatherings of men and women, exploring how we see ourselves in relationship to each other with images that seem to generate their own milky and dreamlike light. Bradford spends months and sometimes years building up the surfaces of her paintings, slowly changing the paintings through repeated application of thinned-out acrylic paint. This book, her first monograph, collects her best paintings from 2015 to the present, alongside essays by Karen Wilkin, who explores Bradford's relationship to the history of American painting; Arthur Bradford, the painter's son, who contributes a memoir of his mother's coming of age, relatively late in life, as a painter; and Dan Nadel, who discusses the evolution of Bradford's current mode of painting and her relationship to her younger contemporaries at Canada gallery.