A continuation of Katherine Bernhardt’s existing site-specific mural projects, the large-scale multi-panel painting titled Blue Skies was created for Unlimited 2018. Blue Skies is an immersive version of the virtuosic ‘pattern’ paintings that have formed the backbone of her practice for the last several years. Bernhardt has drawn from her personal lexicon to create a massive, constellatory travelogue of pop – be it Pac-man heads, cigarettes, laptops, Rubik’s Cubes, toucans, or fruit. Bernhardt’s past large-scale projects include a 27.5-meter outdoor mural covering a wall of Venus Over Los Angeles with oversized fruit in 2015 and an 18-meter painting for the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis in 2017. Both works became a community-wide spectacle due to their enveloping fields of color and seemingly effortless execution. Blue Skies is made up of five stretched canvases, each approximately 4.5 meters in length, installed side-by-side to create a single work just over 21 meters long.
