Tom Burckhardt

The gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new abstract paintings by Tom Burckhardt. It marks the artist’s sixth solo show with the gallery.

The exhibition will comprise fifteen small and medium sized oil paintings. Many of the works are painted on cast plastic, a painting support the artist started working on for his last exhibition. The cast plastic supports are made from molds created by the artist. He has painted trompe l’oeil 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 show will also include a recent group of paintings on more traditional stretched canvas.

The paintings are abstract but suggest references to architecture, landscape, and human forms. The paintings invoke a sense of pareidolia, a psychological 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. They combine unexpected color combination and dramatic contrasts of patterns, image direction, and subtle and broad mark making.

In conversation with artist and writer David Humphrey, a transcript of which appears in the exhibition catalogue, the artist remarks “A lot of my work has a collage sensibility. I enjoy the friction of different things being put together, things that should not live together but which by declaring them together become a fait accompli.This creates an awkward tension that I like.”

Burckhardt has had over twenty solo exhibitions. In 2014 a travelling exhibition of his FULL STOP (2004-2005), a walk-in version of an artist’s studio made of cardboard at life size, opened at the Columbus College of Art & Design. 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.