Jon Serl: No straight lines

New York based artist Katherine Bradford is known for her paintings of people in luminous fields of color. Bradford paints with a formal inventiveness and a shifting sense of figure and ground, giving narrative weight to her characters who may appear as heroes or lovers, families or couples, businessmen or isolated individuals. She began her career as artist relatively late in life and has achieved her widest recognition in her seventies, through New York gallery shows at CANADA, Sperone Westwater, and Pace. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Joan Mitchell Grant. She has taught at Yale School of Art and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Artist Sam Messer received a BFA. from Cooper Union in 1976 and an MFA. from Yale University in 1982. Mr. Messer has received awards including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant in 1984, the Engelhard Award in 1985, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1993, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996. He most recently collaborated with the poet Sharon Olds on a print project, and past collaborations include working with Paul Auster on The Story of My Typewriter, and with Denis Johnson on Cloud of Chalk. Sam’s recent solo exhibition I Sing To You was on view in Athens, Greece at the Allouche-Benias Gallery.