Making Light Visible: Sigrid Burton

Tufenkian Fine Arts is pleased to present, Sigrid Burton: Making Light Visible, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Los Angeles-based painter Sigrid Burton. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Sigrid Burton: Making Light Visible will be on view from September 6th through October 29th, 2022 with an artist reception to be held on Saturday, September 17th from 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm.

The works in this exhibition draw from the phenomenological occurrences of reflection and refraction of light in nature and the cosmos, and refer to similar uses of light found in art, as in works by Monet and Caravaggio. The exhibit highlights Burton’s paintings of richly colored atmospheric grounds and gestural abstractions of organic form, reflecting on ideas of deep space, idiosyncratic mark making, and sensual uses of color. In earlier works, the automatism and free association integral to Surrealist artists like Arshile Gorky, helped inform the creation of her own lexicon of signature marks, drawn from life, natural objects, constellation diagrams, and alphabetic characters, to name a few. A recent ophthalmological disorder has caused Burton to experience unusual visual phenomena as “floaters” within her frame of vision and are revealed in these works.

As a young artist in New York City, Burton worked as a studio assistant to Color Field painters Helen Frankenthaler, and later Jules Olitski, experiences that informed her art practice and exploration of pure, vibrant color. Almost fifty years later, she revisited Frankenthaler’s later works from 1990 to early 2000, recently shown at the Palm Springs Museum of Art. This, along with a fascination with the images of deep space generated by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, influenced the use of a darker palette and an investigation of atmosphere and light as it exists before a descent into darkness. In addition, images of galaxy clusters have inspired some of the organic forms drawn on and submerged within the painting’s surface. Making Light Visible continues Burton’s inquiry into painting as an immersive and thought-provoking experience. The exhibition will be accompanied by an online catalog including an essay by writer and critic Georgia Lassner.