BOBBIE BURGERS
18 FEBRUARY — 27 MARCH 2022
BOBBIE BURGERS TR A NSCR IBING THE ELEMENTS
TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY
Bobbie Burgers in Studio
TR A NSCR IBING THE ELEMENTS
I hope the viewer feels thrown off, I hope the viewer feels welcomed by beauty and the natural, as a welcome mat into uncomfortable instability.
-Bobbie Burgers
Bobbie Burgers is a Canadian artist fascinated with a concept she refers to as “maximalist-minimalist.” Her works builds in energetic brush work, sometimes to a frenzy, while maintaining a balanced quietude in veiled washes and open space. Her first solo exhibition with Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Transcribing the Elements, brings together a vast multitude of media, displaying the artist’s technical ease and exploratory nature. Works on paper reveal themselves to be collaged with woodblock prints and etchings, oil bars and soft pastels manipulated to look like liquid paint. Sprayed acrylic ‘spray paint’ mimics pastels and brushstrokes mimic collage.
I continue to break apart my own work and my own hand, by destroying and creating anew.
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Burgers is interested in the process of decay, transformation, and metamorphosis. With a distinct style that merges abstraction with representation in increasing degrees, her work brings together instinctive compositions while revealing her precise powers of observation. Remarkable for their compositional rhythms, bold coloration, and sweeping gestural brushstrokes, Burgers’ paintings bring alive the fundamental quest to express something personal, subjective and emotive, in a poetic, abstract way.
When I first started to paint ‘still lifes’ it felt very static, like there was one moment that would be preserved. If there is anything I have learned as a mother, daughter, wife, divorcee, sister, friend, nothing is ever static. I slowly broke down everything I thought was right, to find beauty in the everchanging. Light shifts constantly, day to night to day, and I began to see my bouquets that were just there as color inspiration as a total metaphor for our personalities. These were not passive, domesticated, contained. They became emblems of perseverance—change—and as this idea took hold it became more and more clear that these simple flowers were a minor feminist rebel symbol. Born in 1973 in Vancouver, Canada, Bobbie Burgers studied art history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. The artist has been given solo exhibitions throughout North America and exhibited her work around the world, most recently The Hard Work of Spring, a critically acclaimed museum exhibition at the West Vancouver Art Museum. Five of the works in this exhibition have traveled directly from the museum exhibition. Today, her works are in the collections of the Berost Corporation in Toronto and the Royal Bank of Canada, among others. Burgers lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.
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The combined efforts of washes and thin veils of paint that hint at stains left by the energy of my subject, or ghosts of past beings, layer with strong energetic focused brushwork to create a push and pull and allow the viewer to fall in and out of focus. I enjoy the unexpected collision that is occurring in my work at this stage. There is a cultural composite of Asian theories on brushwork, where each movement holds a particular value and meaning in calligraphy, working with elements that I have drawn from European and American Expressionist painting. I want the paint at times to guide itself, moving and drying with its own intentions, finding areas to pool and drip and having its natural interaction with pigment to pigment. At other times, I like to control its destiny, show my own humanness, the movement of my arms and hands, the strong combined with the delicate.
Bobbie Burgers sketch notebook
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RESTORING THE SAVAGE #2, 2021 Mixed media on canvas 66 x 80 inches
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THE ELEMENTS #1, 2022 Mixed media on canvas 60 x 72 inches
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THE ELEMENTS #2, 2022 Mixed media on canvas 60 x 48 inches
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FRAMING NATURE #2, 2020 Mixed media (ceramic, paper, acrylic on canvas and charcoal) mounted on wood panel 70 x 52 inches
Detail of FRAMING NATURE #2
Reflection 2, 2017 Smoke on paper 59 x 59 inches
Burgers in studio
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IMPERFECT OFFERING #2, 2021 Mixed media on paper 50 x 60 inches
IMPERFECT OFFERING #1, 2021 Mixed media on paper 50 x 60 inches
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REDEMPTION #2, 2021 Mixed media on canvas 72 x 60 inches
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REDEMPTION #1, 2021 Mixed media on canvas 60 x 48 inches
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THIS IS NOT THE END IT IS THE BEGINNING #1, 2021 Mixed media on canvas 66 x 66 inches
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THIS IS NOT THE END IT IS THE BEGINNING #2, 2021 Mixed media on canvas 66 x 80 inches
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Detail of THIS IS NOT THE END IT IS THE BEGINNING #2
TRANSCRIBING THE ELEMENTS, 2021 Mixed media on canvas 72 x 60 inches
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Untitled (9.0), 2019 Smoke on paper 45 x 45 inches
PERFORMANCE ART #1, 2021 Mixed media on paper 51 x 39 inches
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Detail of PERFORMANCE ART #1
PERFORMANCE ART #3, 2021 Mixed media on paper 51 x 39 inches
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Burgers in studio
PERFORMANCE ART #2, 2021 Mixed media on paper 51 x 39 inches
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HYSTERIA #6, 2021 Oil on canvas 66 x 56 inches
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THE BEGINNING #2, 2021 Mixed media mounted on wood 50 x 40 inches
Published on the occasion of the exhibition BOBBIE BURGERS TRANSCRIBING THE ELEMENTS 19 February - 27 March 2022 © 2022 All Rights Reserved
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