Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Katherine Bernhardt
American; 21st-century
Chicago, IL: EXPO Chicago (Two Palms’ Booth)
39%
Untitled. 2024. Monotype in watercolor and crayon
I don't like Bernhardt but she's just good enough for me not to hate her — say what you will but she owns those cool tones and her lax application of paint. (In this piece that laxness was gotten at through different technical means than usual, as it's a monotype and she's mostly a painter, but the overall effect is the same as in her best known stuff, so quibbling about medium seems a bit like wonkishness.) In the end, though, it's Bernhardt's ability that gets her into trouble: the satisfaction you might derive from the way that star form coddles R2's dome, or the way the robot's left leg seems weirdly foreshortened and torqued in comparison with how huge and frontal the right one is, is all but quashed by the subject matter. Bernhardt's paintings and prints, no matter what minor visual achievements they manage, will always be more than anything paintings and prints of dumb shit. As visual artworks they're supercilious and withholding; they use their undeniable alrightness to goad you into calling them stupid, which since they’re cool contemporary art would be a stupid thing to do. Too, they justify themselves through memories of eighties art and culture but they have none of that art's criticality, nor do they offer up any of that culture's pleasureableness. To be precise, the problem with this print (as with most of Bernhardt's work) isn't that it takes up mass culture, but that it doesn't state its case for doing so clearly enough. Is this conceptual art about Star Wars nostalgia that happens to be delivered as painting? Or is it pure painting that believes it can get away with the useless stuff it's depicting? Neither one, really, and that's its issue. (2025)