8 May 2008 to 28 June 2008
Reception : Thursday, May 8, 6 - 8 PM
Gallery Hours: 11AM – 6PM, Tuesday – Saturday
Caren Golden Fine Art
539 West 23rd Street
Ground Floor
NY 10011
New York, NY
New York
North America
p: +1 212 727 8304
m:
f: +1 212 727 8360
w: www.carengoldenfineart.com
Tom Burckhardt, Blocks, 2008 Enamel on board, paper, wood and Variform 38 x 47 x 20in
May 8 - June 21, 2008 Reception: Thursday, May 8, 6 - 8 PM
Caren Golden Fine Art is pleased to present Slump, Tom Burckhardt's fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. Burckhardt resumes his ongoing appraisal of his own practice and the sources of the creative impulse in his FULL STOP exhibition of 2005. Burckhardt, who has mounted numerous painting exhibitions, now asks the viewer to question whether his new works are paintings or sculptures; abstract or representational. The slumping "canvases" and artifacts from the studio are made of wood, cardboard and Variform (a synthetic modeling film) and painted with enamel. Each has a funky, hand-built approach, which simultaneously subverts a trompe l'oeil reading of the object and undercuts the air of self-importance associated with hermetic abstraction. While most painters tend to gravitate to one end of the spectrum or the other, Burckhardt chooses to conflate the two approaches, feeding off the charged relationship and reevaluating its boundaries. Is the paint bucket rendered as a representation and the canvas as an abstraction, or vice versa? In a sense this show is a restaging of the moment in art history when Pop Art challenged New York School abstraction for pictorial dominance. Here, however, rather than historicizing the issue, Burckhardt treats it as a personal drama, with humor and affection leading to reconciliation. The conflicting moods of sad sack pessimism and improbable optimism conspire to imply a state of exhaustion, revisiting the doubt displayed in FULL STOP. In Slump Burckhardt collapses the distance between the place of his paintings' creation and the place of their exhibition - with sagging canvases propped on paint cans, crates and ladders. By doing so, Burckhardt rejuvenates these weary objects and invests them with optimism.
Burckhardt states: "Painting is not dead, but it can seem a bit beleaguered. As a young artist, my energy and idealism was unbounded. At this point, in middle age, I need to reignite my love of the act of painting. I want to have it all, and this form of artmaking is my way of having objective and abstract paintings co-exist in a unique way. Many people still come to a painting on the wall of a gallery and assume it has already achieved a certain level of authority. As an artist, I don't always trust this relationship; if we beat down these preconceptions, perhaps a genuine optimistic space will be opened. By lowering the floor, you raise the ceiling."
In 2005/2006, Tom Burckhardt's FULL STOP was exhibited at Caren Golden Fine Art, NYC, DiverseWorks in Houston, TX and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT. Burckhardt's work has been praised in The New York Times, Art in America, ArtForum, ArtNews, Art & Antiques, Harper's and The New Yorker, among others. He is a two-time recipient of the Pollack-Krasner grant.
REVIEW
20th June, 2008 The New York Times
Art in Review
Tom Burckhardt's abstract paintings have always had a sly, self-aware, self-parodying aspect built into their not-always-so-abstract images. His last show, "Full Stop," took a break from the rigors of abstraction with a full-size three-dimensional painter's studio made entirely of ink on corrugated cardboard. It resembled a walk-in mock-up in grisaille. The piece also bade farewell to a job that was more than a job: after 22 years Mr. Burckhardt had just stopped working as an assistant to Red Grooms who is no stranger to the painted three-dimensional facsimile.
"Slump" prolongs the break from more or less orthodox abstraction. It shows the artist letting his work go a little soft (literally) and contaminating it with bits of reality. Here the studio is evoked not as a whole, but in scattered, isolated still lifes, three-dimensional sculptural vignettes built from scratch and painted in living color with fluctuating trompe l'oeil effects.
Perched on messy but carefully rendered paint cans, his colorful canvases sag into the wall as if they've had a long day. They let themselves go and warp. They lean against stools looking unfinished, perhaps never to be finished. The fiction is visible to varying degrees. You'll recognize the wood grain of the stretchers as painted, but the red plastic milk carton in "Tuscan" looks quite real.
Mr. Burckhardt's latest efforts belong to the art-about-art tradition as well as to the strand of comical, usually painted remade objects that begins in earnest with Mr. Grooms and includes artists like Kevin Landers, Jonathan Seliger and Jean Lowe. Mr. Burckhardt's sense of touch and materials gives his work a tender balance of abstraction, realism and caricature. He frees painting from canvas to evoke its natural habitat, where work piles up, hoping for completion, while a certain unseen party waits for inspiration to strike.
