Bernadette Witzack works in painting, drawing, screenprinting, fabric, and mixed media. Her creative process is spontaneous and improvisational; the artist cycles through an associative process of accessing stored knowledge drawn from memory, emotional experiences, and bodily sensations, often starting with a specific color, or a feeling that has been translated into a shape. The resulting compositions are colorful, abstract and bodily, tragic and triumphant, serious and humorous.
Witzack’s work exists simultaneously as abstract configurations of color, shape, and texture, and as intimate, confessional narratives that explore feelings, affect and emotion, and what it feels like to inhabit a female body in the world. The works become beings in and of themselves, self-defined visual entities with idiosyncratic personalities and real bodily presence.
Witzack holds a BA in Studio Art from Beloit College and an MFA from the University of Michigan, and is currently enrolled in the Graphic Design/Web Design Program at Madison College. Her work has been exhibited regionally and nationally. Exhibitions of note include the Portrait Society (Milwaukee), the Madison Children's Museum, the John Michael Kohler Art Center, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, the Zhou B. Arts Center in Chicago, Work Gallery in Ann Arbor, the University of Minnesota and Wayne State University.
