Artist: Katherine Bernhardt
Title: Phone Home
Size: 59 7/8 x 47 5/8 inches (152 x 121 cm)
Medium: Acrylic and Spray Paint on Canvas
Edition: Original
Year: 2019
Notes: Signed, titled and dated 'Katherine Bernhardt 2019 "Phone Home"' on the reverse. Acquired from Phillips.
About: ‘[Bernhardt] has painted fictional figures like the Pink Panther, Babar the Elephant and Garfield, but E.T. is more dimensional, complicated by a kind of saintliness, otherness and conflict: He is a stranger in an inhospitable land who has healing powers and wants to go home.’
— Roberta Smith for The New York Times
Executed in 2019, Phone Home is a striking example of Missouri-born, Brooklyn-based artist Katherine Bernhardt's electric paintings that explore the mundane iconography of contemporary culture. Here, the lovable, fictional alien who universally known as ‘E.T.’, takes centre stage. Rendered in expressive acrylic and spray paint on canvas, the otherworldly creature is depicted with a finger pointed to space, referencing Steven Spielberg’s 1982 film’s most iconic scene where the titular E.T. repeatedly calls out for home. Teeming with eye-popping energy, the protagonist in Phone Home is composed of vibrant blue outlined in green, with neon orange, yellow and pink thrown into the mix. Slap-dash strokes of colour and form jostle for space across the work in its entirety, perfectly encapsulating Bernhardt’s gestural approach.