Katherine Bradford

Episode 5Katherine Bradford
Series

Sunlight & Solitude

Sunlight & Solitude brings together works that hold summer in luminous suspension — figures drifting through radiant seas, portraits alive with heat and immediacy, and abstractions that blur like haze. Each piece becomes a meditation on light as memory, presence, and reflection.

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Episode 5 of 6

Katherine Bradford

Katherine Bradford, born 1942 in New York, is an American painter celebrated for her radiant, dreamlike canvases where atmosphere and narrative unfold in tandem. Working with luminous planes of color, she gently dissolves the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, creating expansive visual worlds that feel both intimate and vast. Her compositions often feature swimmers, ships, and floating figures suspended in chromatic fields, their distilled and androgynous forms resisting specificity to stand as universal presences. These figures appear both vulnerable and resilient, embodying states of wonder, reflection, and quiet transcendence. Through her glowing palettes and enigmatic scenes, Bradford offers spaces that speak to human connection, longing, and the poetic tension between isolation and presence, affirming painting’s power to evoke shared emotional experience.

Episode

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Parent and Child in Water
Swimmer with Rainbow
Double Divers and Onlooker
Swim Team
Katherine BradfordSwim Team, 2025
20 x 25.5cm
Close Couple Purple
Figure Walking out to Sea
Carry Painting, Mother
Yellow Suits Yellow Sand
House by the Sea and Wader
At the Edge of the Lake
Swimmers by the Town
Seven Swimmers
Katherine BradfordSeven Swimmers, 2022
101.6 x 76.2cm
Lifeguards in the Sky
Katherine BradfordLifeguards in the Sky, 2021
182.88 x 152.4cm
Swan Dive with Onlooker
Katherine BradfordSwan Dive with Onlooker, 2021
167.64 x 142.24cm
Featured Artist

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Katherine Bradford
Artist
Katherine Bradford
B.1942, American

Katherine Bradford was born in New York, 1942. she lives and works in New York. Bradford’s mesmerizing yet rigorous visual language freely traverses the relationship between nonobjective and representational painting, allowing potential narratives to unfold and interweave with the investigation of form and color. Vast expanses of color divide her canvases into distinct horizontal planes while the variations in saturation and tone evoke an elusive yet almost palpable atmosphere. Lighter and darker hues are interchangeable and used without functional or hierarchical distinction, introducing spatial elements such as the sea and the sky, beaches and poolsides. These monochromatic backgrounds are occupied by human figures, often swimmers and bathers, whose androgynous, featureless bodies are roughly sketched. Driven by an unbiased curiosity, the artist allows her imagery to acquire a porous malleability where a pictorial sign becomes a signifier. Bradford’s practice has honed over four decades, maturing into a nonacademic, creative freedom that resonates deeply with the aesthetical and socio-political concerns of our time. It is her commitment to dynamic change and to the fluid state of human togetherness that Bradford so poignantly expresses in her radiant liquid fields. ...

More Works By: Katherine Bradford

Surfers with Surf Boards
Swimmers and Their Lifeguard
Water Jumpers
Katherine BradfordWater Jumpers, 2021
122.56 x 91.44cm
Drinks by the Pool
Katherine BradfordDrinks by the Pool, 2021
152.4 x 182.88cm
Listening to Music by the Sea
Swimmers on Yellow Sand
Katherine BradfordSwimmers on Yellow Sand, 2021
182.88 x 152.4cm
The winner
Katherine BradfordThe winner, 2021
203.2 x 172.7cm
Neighborhood Pool
Katherine BradfordNeighborhood Pool, 2022
203.2 x 345.44cm
Pool Side Swimmer
Katherine BradfordPool Side Swimmer, 2022
121.6 x 91.4 x 4.1cm
Talkers and Listeners
Waiting Room Blue
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Mostafa Sarabi
Series: Sunlight & SolitudeEpisode 6
Mostafa Sarabi

Sarabi’s dreamlike worlds blend myth, memory, and nature, where summer’s warmth becomes a timeless sanctuary of mystery, reverie, and quiet companionship.

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