Katherine Bernhardt

Katherine Bernhardt was born in 1975 in the St. Louis, Missouri area (some sources give the specific suburb of Clayton). She earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2000, with additional study through an NYU summer intensive program and a landscape-painting exchange at the International School of Art in Umbria, Italy.

Her mature paintings take the visual vocabulary of consumer culture, pop-culture characters such as Arthur and Garfield, cigarettes, toilet paper, bananas, sneakers, and tropical fruit, and repeat them across large canvases in loose, spray-painted grids that draw on the logic of textile and wallpaper pattern. Early solo exhibitions, including at Roberto Paradise in San Juan, were followed by a steady run of gallery and museum shows through CANADA, New York, and eventually David Zwirner. She has lived and worked in Brooklyn and, more recently, in a restored modernist home in St. Louis, where she continues an active studio practice as of 2026.

Institutional attention has accelerated steadily. The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis commissioned a site-specific mural, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth mounted the solo survey FOCUS: Katherine Bernhardt, both in 2017. Museo Mario Testino in Lima followed with Watermelon World in 2018. Her work is held in prominent institutional collections, including the Rubell Museum in Miami. Two upcoming 2026 solo exhibitions, at Seongnam Arts Center in Korea and at Halle fur Kunst Steiermark in Graz, Austria, extend her institutional presence into continental Europe and East Asia. A Lever House Art Collection profile also notes that she was honored at a Hirshhorn Museum gala, though the exact year of that honor is not specified in the available materials.

Bernhardt's best-documented auction result is USD 156,000, reported by the auction-data platform HENI for an untitled 2017 painting sold at Sotheby's in New York in November 2024; the exact day of sale is not published. Two lower benchmarks are also documented: USD 82,550 for an untitled work at Phillips, with the exact sale date not published, and USD 81,250 for Plantains, Bananas & Toilet Paper (2015), sold at Sotheby's in 2018, which David Zwirner's own gallery materials described at the time as a record-breaking result. Because full auction-database detail such as lot number and exact sale date is not available for the more recent, higher results, they should be read as the best current evidence of her ceiling rather than a fully reconciled record. The overall pattern is a market still working out its own ceiling: strong gallery demand and rising institutional recognition, against a comparatively thin and only partly documented resale history.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Bernhardt, and no documented certificate-of-authenticity program; provenance and authenticity currently run through her two representing galleries, CANADA and David Zwirner. Her auction history is comparatively short and not fully reconciled across sources: the confirmed high is USD 156,000 (Sotheby's New York, November 2024, per HENI), superseding earlier benchmarks of USD 82,550 (Phillips) and USD 81,250 (Sotheby's, 2018), and any of these figures should be treated with some caution until fuller sale details are independently confirmed. The stronger signal for collectors is the pace of institutional validation: back-to-back gallery presentations in New York and Los Angeles in 2025 and 2026, a public commission on the High Line, and upcoming first-time solo exhibitions in Korea and Austria, all pointing to a market that is being built from the institutional side first.