New York– and Maine-based painter Katherine Bradford has been active since the 1970s, yet her ambiguously narrative, color-saturated paintings have recently assumed newfound relevance in the context of work by younger artists such as Katherine Bernhardt, Dan McCarthy, and Michael Williams. Considering both career arc and choice of painterly themes, however, Bradford’s closest peer may be Joyce Pensato, who also began eliciting attention relatively late and whose works resonate with Bradford’s cheekily dramatic cartoon-character portraits, which shuffle interestingly close to bathos.

Bradford’s