LOS ANGELES—Tufenkian Fine Arts will present, “Sigrid Burton: Making Light Visible,” an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Los Angeles-based painter Sigrid Burton whose work the gallery proudly represents. 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 with an artist reception to be held on Saturday, September, 17th from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m.
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 Georgia Lassner.
As a native Angeleno, Sigrid Burton had been exposed from an early age to California Light and Space artists whose work with color and light created atmospheric environments.
In the early 70s, she moved to New York City and thrived in the artist community of Soho for forty years before returning to Pasadena where she now lives and works. For the past ten years, she has been attending lectures at the Carnegie Observatories, learning about current trends in Astronomy and Astro-Physics, which has informed her work. Burton is the recipient of an Indo-American Senior Research Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center Residency Fellowship, and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and is represented by Tufenkian Fine Arts in Glendale, California. Her works are included in numerous public and corporate collections, most notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the John & Mabel Ringling Museum.
