The gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new abstract paintings by Tom Burckhardt. It marks the artist’s fifth solo show with the gallery. The exhibition will comprise twenty small and medium sized oil paintings. The works are all painted on cast plastic, a material that is poured into molds made by the artist. He has painted trompe l’oeil thumbtacks and folds of canvas on the sides of the pieces, the effect of which is that the works inhabit a space somewhere between painting and sculpture.
The paintings are abstract but suggest references to architecture, landscape, and human forms. The paintings invoke a sense of pareidolia, a phychological phenomenon whereby the viewer sees a face or some other familiar image in an abstract pattern. Many of the works are filled with exquisite and precise detail; others are more muted, with broad patterns.
Burckhardt has had over twenty solo exhibitions. In 2011 his work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC. The artist is the recipient of the International Association of Art Critics Award, the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and two Pollack-Krasner Foundation grants. The artist lives in New York and spends his summers in Maine.