Katherine Bernhardt is known for her colorful paintings that feature her singular visual lexicon of motifs taken from pop culture as well as her own life. ‘Untitled’ (2024) features Cookie Monster, the ‘Sesame Street’ character. In lieu of cookies, his wide-open mouth reveals other treats—the colorful marshmallow shapes in Lucky Charms cereal.
The work pays playful homage to the fifteenth-century Bolognini Chapel fresco ‘Inferno’ (c. 1410) by Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni da Modena. In one of the panels, a blue-haired beast devours a screaming human while surrounded by gruesome scenes. Bernhardt reimagines this grotesque hellmouth in a joyful painting in which a much more sympathetic monster is rendered in a bright, high-contrast palette that recalls mass-market food advertising.