BRUNSWICK — “Katherine Bradford: AUGUST” will open at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art with a public reception beginning at 6 p.m. on Saturday, June 29, in coordination with the opening of the exhibition “Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea.”

Bradford is a New York-based painter and a longtime member of the Maine arts community. The exhibition includes eight of Bradford’s recent paintings, which are all concerned with the ocean, populated by boats and bathers, as a metaphor for the vagaries of modern life. Bradford’s ocean paintings can simultaneously be read as hilarious and catastrophic, decorative and sublime. Like many maritime-inspired artists before her, Bradford enjoys capturing waves with vigorous brushstrokes, but she does not aim at rendering nature realistically. Instead, she subversively imitates abstract art, reinterpreting it in her own figurative idiom. The exhibition will continue through Sept. 1.

Katherine Bradford lives and works in New York City and in Brunswick. A reception for the artist and this exhibition will take place from 6-7 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 9. Immediately following, Bradford will present a gallery talk as part of Brunswick’s Second Friday Art- Walk, which is free and open to the public.