Katherine Bernhardt burst onto the international art scene in the mid-2000s with a series of powerful and bittersweet portraits of celebrities and models. Taking inspiration from fashion photography, magazine reports, advertising campaigns and fashion shows, she turned trends in high fashion and luxury advertising into an immortal art form. Her portrait of Kate Moss summarises the period's mass media obsession with the beautiful supermodel who was then in the midst of a drug scandal.
Katherine Bernhardt is drawn to the superficial, the perfect, and the mass media's stylised image of beauty, but at the same time she is well known for her bold and abstract approach to her paintings of supermodels. Bernhardt's paintings balance between tightly composed and wild. There is a rhythmic positioning in her quick, elegant brushstrokes and broad, bold movements that cross the canvas in sweeps. Every detail of the model is broken down into basic elements - an arm, rosy cheeks, a well-styled hairstyle - simplified to form only pattern, colour and shape. Bernhardt then organises these elements to build her figures. The same approach applies to her paintings of the cartoon character Pink Panther or of everyday objects in the home, characterised by semi-finished products and mass consumption.
She has told Interview magazine (Christopher Bollen, 23 November 2008) how she came to paint subjects from the world of fashion: ‘I guess it just kind of happened naturally. I always looked at magazines. Ever since I was little I was obsessed with Elle magazine and the models. I would watch the model TV shows, like the specials on Milla Jovovich.’