KATHERINE BRADFORD. Sky Swimmers: Kunsthalle Emden, Emden, Germany

With Katherine Bradford: Sky Swimmers, Kunsthalle Emden is proud to be one of the first European institutions to present a solo exhibition of the American artist. Katherine Bradford (b. 1942) creates works that are characterized by a blend of figuration and abstraction along with a vibrant, contemporary color palette; her recurring motifs of swimmers, supermen, and acrobats populate the canvases in mystical, surreal scenes, and are the focus of the exhibition in Emden. These anonymous figures—some truncated, some whole—appear ghostly and other-worldly. Strong painterly reduction breaks them down to the essentials: devoid of faces, characteristic body features, or gender classification, the figures seem mysterious and masked. They are depicted in suspended states, in which both the before and the after are ambiguous: thus, they are made a commonplace of human existence. Whether the bodies are standing, swimming, or floating, their interrelations can be read as a visual metaphor for social relationships such as community and isolation, vulnerability and strength, and activity and passivity.