Katherine Bernhardt: Sidewalk Chalk

The exhibition title Sidewalk Chalk conjures images of the colorful cylinders that children use to draw freely on pavements and sidewalks, echoing Bernhardt’s exploration of this kind of playful open expression and engagement with American youth culture. The typical palette of sidewalk chalk—comprising varying shades of blue, pink, and yellow—echo that of these new paintings, the compositions of which unfurl rhapsodically without restraint. To create her works, the artist first draws on upright canvases with spray paint, after which she lays them on the floor to apply acrylic paint thinned out with water. Moving back and forth between several paintings at once, Bernhardt invites accident and chance into each of her dynamic compositions through her fast-paced actions. In some of her new, larger-scale compositions, Bernhardt experiments with a mop alongside other instruments to apply paint across sweeping swaths of canvas.

In Chew (2024), Bernhardt fills the wide-open maw of Cookie Monster with her signature rolls of toilet paper and loose cigarettes, a prepared toothbrush, and tubs of Vaseline. Two tubes of Crest toothpaste enter the frame from the top right corners, as if ready to squeeze their contents into the creature’s waiting mouth. Bernhardt’s series of images pays a winking art-historical homage to the fifteenth-century Bolognini Chapel fresco by Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni da Modena, known as the Inferno (c. 1410), in which a similarly blue-haired beast devours and excretes a screaming human being while surrounded by a swirling host of shocking events. Here, Bernhardt reimagines the hellmouth as a joyful landscape for a kind of new pattern painting that jumbles together a plethora of items: sticks of butter, Lucky Charms marshmallows, shooting stars, the McDonald’s logo, and Cookie Monster’s own preferred treats.

In some works, Bernhardt adopts a softer, matte palette that brings to mind mass-market food advertising. Invoking butter yellow, KitchenAid’s 2025 “color of the year,” she peppers her new compositions with thick rectangular forms of the wrapped, labeled dairy product. In It’s Butter! (2024), the cartoon cat Garfield is flanked by two tall yellow columns of the titular spread as he cheerfully stretches his arms out wide. A stick of butter runs along the diagonal of the Pink Panther’s cheek in Butter Butter Butter Butter Butter (2024) as rainbow- and crescent-shaped Lucky Charms marshmallows dance around the frame. In these paintings, colors and lines bleed and pool together across their surfaces, revealing Bernhardt’s brisk and improvisational process.