The price of Bernhardt’s work is also heavily predicated on the fact that her paintings, over time, have gotten much bigger. “When I met Katherine, she was painting in her studio apartment,” said Grauer. “She literally made them at the end of her bed on pre-stretched, store-bought canvases.”
With success came larger spaces, and with larger spaces came larger paintings. The record-breaking PLANTAINS, BANANAS & TOILET PAPER measures a whopping 8 by 10 feet. At the 2018 edition of Art Basel in Basel, the artist made a splash in the Unlimited sector with Blue Skies (2018), a 69-foot-wide painting. Despite her phenomenal commercial success, it’s still possible to purchase a modestly sized Bernhardt pattern painting for a little more than what her work was selling for during her bedroom studio days. An untitled 2016 work on paper sold for £6,875 ($8,500) through one of Phillips’s online auctions last month. Last summer, at the Upstairs Art Fair in the Hamptons, Canada sold Bernhardt’s small paintings of cartoon cats Garfield and Pink Panther for $12,000 and $5,000 apiece, respectively.