NYAB Event - Richmond Burton “RICHMOND BURTON: I AM paintings (the return)”

Richmond Burton “RICHMOND BURTON: I AM paintings (the return)”

ART 3

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ART 3 gallery presents RICHMOND BURTON: I AM paintings (the return) featuring works from the artist’s groundbreaking I AM series of paintings. This exhibition will mark a 15-year anniversary and return to the seminal works, originally shown in 2001 at Cheim & Read, New York, NY.

Richmond Burton’s works are known for their kaleidoscopic color, undulating patterns, and lyrical handling of expressionistic mark making. The I AM paintings manage to simultaneously hold two truths without becoming one or the other. They exist both as geometric, structured, formal, while concurrently being relaxed, visceral, seductive, and organic compositions. The works play with decorative patterning without compromising a conceptual backbone. Their intensity of vision allows for transcendent thought, experience, and connection while challenging any preconceived norms or rules defining abstract painting.

The paintings hold a tension between ruptured grids and naturalistic, diffused light with jolts of intense jewel-like color. Metallic colors are used—gold, silver, and copper thread through the work and coalesce into details, concentrated inlay or patterned punctuation. Abstracted forms break and congeal, with imagery reminiscent of swirling sperm, egg yolks, rocks, petals, leaves, and shells. There is also no hierarchy between singular artist references such as Gustav Klimt, Lee Krasner, Roberto Matta, Joan Miró, Jackson Pollock, and Alma Thomas versus craft-based affinities such as that of Byzantine icons, Art Nouveau, calligraphy, tapestry and mosaic.

This value of handling and craft-based technique could be traced to Burton’s childhood in Talladega, AL where as a toddler he made ceramics with his artist grandmother. Burton went on to formally study art and architecture at Rice University, Houston, TX while working part-time for Dominique de Menil who became an influential art world mentor. Burton then moved to New York, taking a job with the architectural firm of I. M. Pei and began working on important projects such as the pyramid design of the Louvre. After leaving to pursue his artwork, Burton was introduced to and worked for another influential art world mentor, Susan Sontag. Burton has transitioned from the city to the country. First living in East Hampton, NY and working in Elaine de Kooning’s old studio and now residing in Woodstock, NY.
“Susan [Sontag] summed it up when she said: ‘most people are afraid of their feelings.’ What I find lacking is an awareness of inner feelings. This profoundly affects me as an artist. My art is all about feelings, as I think Susan’s work [was]. I see how people react. It usually takes them a long time, many years, to come around to my work.”
— As said to Johnny Misheff for Austere, 2014

Richmond Burton (b. 1960, Talladega, AL) obtained a BA in architecture from Rice University Houston, TX (1984). He lives and works in Woodstock, NY. Burton has shown extensively both domestically and internationally and has work in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; The Broad, Los Angeles, CA; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Fogg Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY; and National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, among others. Recent solo exhibitions include venues such as Sarah Moody Gallery of Art at University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL (2015); Silas Marder Gallery, Bridgehampton, NY (2014); Philip Slein Gallery, St. Louis, MO (2013); and George Lawson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2011). Notable press includes reviews in Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, The Huffington Post, The New Yorker, The New York Observer, The New York Times, and The Village Voice.