Shower Power is a graphic by Katherine Bernhardt that was executed as a color one-off. Given the numerous color variations, Bernhardt was less drawn to a single version than to the mis-entries, color smudges, paint splatters and other unforeseen incidents that occurred during the proofing process. They were so appealing to Bernhardt that she decided to include them in the complete edition. She asked the printer to select the colors relatively arbitrarily and allow the same unplanned marks that would occur in a simple proof. The end result is a series of 75 unique prints. For Bernhardt, this way of making a print is very close to her studio practice and instinct for making images, where chance and the accidental are favored over the mechanical and pre-planned. At the center of each print is the infamous Pink Panther, a long-standing recurring motif in Bernhardt’s work. In Shower Power, Bernhardt places the cartoon figure in front of the modernist grid of the oversized, colorful shower in her St. Louis studio. Bernhardt began painting the pink panther after she arrived at the Pink Palace Hotel (also called the Royal Hawai’ian Hotel) on a sandy beach in Waikiki, Oahu. The hotel had pink bath towels, pink sheets, pink eye masks for sleeping, pink rugs, pink beach chairs, pink beach towels, pink stationery, pink sunsets, pink pancakes for breakfast and the Pink Panther on TV screens. After seeing videos of the Panther over and over – lying on a giant pink bed and as she strolled the hotel grounds, her son Khalifa continued to watch Pink Panther videos from a cell phone – Bernhardt decided that the Panther might also look good on a large-scale canvas and a large-scale lithograph.

Katherine Bernhardt, represented by the influential David Zwirner, is a major player in the contemporary New York painting scene. She has collaborated with hip-hop superstar Drake, painted a swimming pool in Miami, created a public mural in Los Angeles and runs her own Moroccan rug import business. Bernhardt’s recent solo exhibitions include the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Lever House New York and European solo exhibitions at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels and Carl Freedman in London and Margate. Bernhardt was born in 1975 in St. Louis, Missouri. She lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri.