Katherine Bradford:
Magenta Nights
April 27–June 2, 2018

Adams and Ollman is pleased to announce Magenta Nights, an exhibition with Katherine Bradford, the artist's third with the gallery.

Katherine Bradford’s bold paintings depict ships, swimmers, divers and superheroes–iconic imagery that the artist has used over the course of her career. These figures appear against transient, ephemeral grounds that toggle between the representational space of dark sky or ocean waters, and abstract fields of color. The undefined vastness of the canvas becomes an intentional place for imagination, as the paintings convey a personal universe of Bradford’s own making, a universe populated with hard-won symbologies, and filled with the artist’s deep interest in the materiality of paint.

On view in Magenta Nights will be new works, united by a shared color palette and sense of wonder, that feature figures, androgynous and in a state of suspension, riding, wading, gazing, or floating. Through dreamlike layers, Bradford's forms are intuitively reduced to highlight the elements in which she is most interested. Discerning visual choices temper the grandiosity of painting’s legacy. With a sensitivity of line, form and texture, her figures remind us of the vulnerability and comedy simultaneously inherent to the human experience.

K. Bradford: Works on Paper, a publication focusing on the artist's intimate gouache and collage works along with a poem contributed by the writer Eileen Myles, accompanies the exhibition.

Katherine Bradford lives and works in New York. Bradford's works have been exhibited at MoMA PS1, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Massachusetts; the Weatherspoon Gallery, North Carolina; and most recently at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas, and Prospect 4, New Orleans, Louisiana. She has been honored with two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is in the permanent collections of New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; Smith College Museum, Massachusetts; Dallas Art Museum, Texas; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Pennsylvania; and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon.

installation view, Magenta Nights


installation view, Magenta Nights


installation view, Magenta Nights


installation view, Magenta Nights


installation view, Magenta Nights


installation view, Magenta Nights


Katherine Bradford
Magenta Nights, 2017
acrylic on canvas
40 x 30 inches
KBrad 93


Katherine Bradford
Turquoise Beach, 2017
acrylic on canvas
60 x 48 inches
KBrad 94


Katherine Bradford
Family Wading Pool, 2017
acrylic on canvas
55 x 72 inches
KBrad 95


Katherine Bradford
Bike Rider, 2017
acrylic on canvas
30 x 40 inches
KBrad 96


Katherine Bradford
Splash Hand, 2017
acrylic on canvas
40 x 30 inches
KBrad 97


Katherine Bradford
House by the Sea Magenta, 2017
acrylic on canvas
24 x 18 inches
KBrad 98


Katherine Bradford
Swim at 6:10, 2018
acrylic on canvas
24 x 18 inches
KBrad 102