Katherine Bernhardt’s paintings embody cosmopolitan edginess. Her lush canvases – which themselves pose as the currency of beguiling luxury – incorporate all the fantasy trappings of seduction, decadence and corruption, each charged with sordid soap operatic climax and the command of true-to-type bitches and divas. Looming larger than life, Bernhardt’s demoiselles flaunt exaggerated tales of womanly wiles: a tribe of Amazonian it-girls, goddesses, and super-heroines languishing in the ennui of money, power and style.

Approaching painting as a platform for fiction, Bernhardt’s imagined characters are richly contrived portraits encapsulating both the vacuity of media image and the unpredictable response of consumer over-identification. Rendered with the fury of both adulation and envy, Bernhardt’s models emerge as freakish inventions – all Max Factor raccoon eyes, emaciated limbs, and swollen red pouts; troubled beauties relishing both idolisation and abuse.