Executed in 2019, Fake Love is a striking example of Missouri-born, Brooklyn-based artist Katherine Bernhardt's electric and playful aesthetic. After bursting onto the contemporary art scene with her thickly-painted portraits of magazine models, she turned her attention to patterns influenced by the juxtapositions found in African textiles and contemporary Dutch wax fabrics, as well as popular culture objects and motifs. One of her most referenced cartoon-character icons is the Pink Panther, who makes a double cameo in Fake Love, rendered in hot, fluorescent magenta and outlined in metallic gold. Teeming with eye-popping energy, the pair of panthers are set against a textured grey background, framed by two neon green speech bubbles that each contain the globally recognisable symbol for a telephone – the logo for the ubiquitous phone messaging app Whatsapp.
Esteemed art critic Jerry Saltz has dubbed Bernhardt a 'female bad-boy painter', likening her to Jean-Michel Basquiat for her paintings that 'exude obsession, endlessness, and germinating optical power' (Jerry Saltz, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Bad-Boy Artists? There Have Been, of Course. But the Art World Has Refused to Recognize Them.’, New York Magazine, 29 September 2015, online). Roberta Smith draws another comparison, complimenting Bernhardt on how she 'paints with great economy and panache, as Andy Warhol might have without silk-screens' (Roberta Smith, 'Katherine Bernhardt: Stupid, Crazy, Ridiculous, Funny Patterns’, The New York Times, 20 February 2014, online). Unique to Bernhardt, however, is her ability to quickly create spray paint compositions with washes of acrylic that are fluid, thoughtful, and above all, unabashedly fun.