Negra Bernhard in the studio, 2025, photo: © Moritz Bernhard

Short Bio

Born in Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina, on January 11th in 1986, Negra Bernhard migrated to Austria with her family in 1992 due to the Bosnian War. She obtained Austrian citizenship in 1999.

From 2017 to 2022, Bernhard studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under the mentorship of  Prof. Daniel Richter, ultimately earning her diploma with distinction.

Since 2023, she has been represented by Smolka Contemporary in Vienna. Since 2024, also by SAV Gallery in Los Angeles and MLZ Art Dep in Trieste.

Bernhard’s work is held in several private collections in Austria, Germany, Italy, France, Belgium and the United States. She lives and works in Baden near Vienna.

Awards & Residencies

Artist Residency 2024 | SAV Gallery, Los Angeles
Emerging Artist Programme 2022 | Contemporary Art Collectors
Shortlist Bank Austria Kunstpreis 2019 | Galerie3, Klagenfurt

 

Artist Statement

My engagement with painting as an inventory of what is going on in and around me, as well as in what is out there in the world, oscillates equally between sarcasm, insecurity and alienation towards the world in which we live. For me, painting is a penetration into another dimension of existence, into a space of its own, where I can mess with, but also cut the world, like the eternal shedding of a snake in the cycle of being.

The psychologically intellectual content can sometimes be interpreted as autobiographical, but in a broader sense it can be read as a mirror of a subjectively perceived state of the world and often also deals with political topics besides childhood memories, personal life experience and dreams. What interests me is the interplay and interconnectedness of all these aspects. My work is primarily about reflecting the hallucinatory tension between these internal and external states of being in order to distort perception and create psychedelic visions that evoke the dreamlike, often in the form of mystical, nocturnal dreamscapes populated by wolves, foxes, and jackals, animals that appear as symbolic figures of isolation, transformation, and yearning.

Basically, in the end the focus is on people and their sensitivities. Lonesome and longing to howl at the full moon with others. In the broadest sense, it is also about the brokenness of society and painting as one of the means in the fight against it, a form of coping mechanism that peaks in a disorienting, emotionally charged space with the aim to synthesize all elements into an introspective, otherworldly visual language that transcends reality.

My work tends to reflect the duality of the artist’s existence—belonging yet detached, engaged yet alienated, forever questioning their place in the world they depict.

mail@negrabernhard.com
@negrabernhard (instagram)