Robyn Burgess
Travel and the foreign city have nourished the research of Burgess’ paintings and works on paper over the past 20 years. The city, its architecture and art have become the subject matter, but the notion of pilgrimage and travel simmer and brood as a metaphor for life…one realises that the spiritual journey is the actual journey. At home in the studio the ideas and memories accumulate and wait. But as American artist Philip Guston implied, it is best when all your ideas finally leave and you are completely alone. For Burgess, the closed flat space of the painted abstract surface will always remain a pictorial process where the medium may become the message and the narrative hovers or remains a secret. We are the stories we tell and don’t tell.
Recently, due to specific exhibitions and ideas, Burgess has combined two separate bodies of work. The architectural bridge sits alongside a webbed crinoline human structure; the latter evolved from research of Velasquez’ Las Meninas in the Prado, Spain. Both reveal elements such as the grid, shape, repetition, symmetry and rhythm. For Burgess, both demonstrate a different pace in the work whilst grappling with the structure of gesture and the layering of paint.
Burgess’ works harbour both calculated ideas and spontaneous impulses; she loves the physical properties of paint and she uses a lot of it.
Click here for artwork by Robyn Burgess
Exhibitions at Tacit include
2024 Impulse
Painting suspends time; it grips the present, acknowledges the past and returns to that illusion of the present; a place where the clock has stopped…for a bit.
These pictures are about that moment in time; a glance, a stance, a chance for continual growth into the next body of work.
Beat eludes to an internal journey rather than an external image. Impulsive, loaded with feeling and introspection; colourful, yet made during a time of immense sadness and isolation.
The work in this show flips and turns in its subject matter, from the sensory to clarity, abandon and chance form alliance. Some hover between the ‘deliberately unfinished’ to works of many layers and revision over time.
Squall is a response to the frantic winter weather seen from my attic window. Made quickly, it does carry the weight of universal concerns but moreover it is about looking and making, without concern for consequences. Like most of these works, there is no narrative – I am not a storyteller but perhaps a rememberer, steeped in elegiac feeling. Behind all of the works is a longing - that the work will arrive at a destination, and when it doesn’t you continue working anyway. There are traces of beloved and previous subject matter and inspiration throughout the works:
- Travel has enabled me to gather elements of the foreign where I have sought out architecture, nurturing my interest in geometry and the division of space. It has also nourished an interest in extreme climates in winter, such as Russia and Siberia. I have been able to see paintings by artists which have carried me through decades of research and the gathering of new ways of working; for example Velazquez and his works in the Prado. Extensive reading and music have always been an inspiration in my world and are entwined in the paintings.
- The Bridge evokes my interest in architecture, and acts as a metaphor of the monument and movement of life.
- The powerful interest in shape and how I can best place forms within the canvas, with consideration for everything from edge to edge; structure, arrangement …invention and compositional devices.
Though I have worked with many mediums, it is my obsession with oil paint which surpasses all that I attempt in works, both small and large – the economy of touch and surface quality within paintings, the texture, viscosity and physicality of paint is wondrous and relentless.
At days end, curiosity menaces the fabric of reality.
2024 Beneath: small works
'I think my paintings and drawings develop in the process of ‘making’. The small works in the exhibition have links to large studio works but survive despite oscillating wildly in subject matter. They address the significance of shape, the underlying architectural form, the division of space within the frame; its geometry. Even the edge of the picture is a fascination for me.
These pictorial issues are secondary to the medium as it ‘becomes’ the message - the structure of gesture, the vastness and mystery of oil paint, of making marks and the joy and frustration of erasing them, the layering of media and the tension of revealing and covering an image or narrative. Some works might take two years to make, others two days.'
As Philip Guston said - Go to the studio, but don’t expect to know what will unfold
Exhibitions
solo
2024 Impulse - Tacit Art, Melbourne
Beneath: small works - Tacit Art, Melbourne
2021 The Watched - Tacit Art, Melbourne
2019 The Staircase - Tacit Art, Melbourne
2018 The Panic Room - Tacit Art, Melbourne
2017 Painting - Tacit Art, Melbourne
2016 The Dressmaker & the Painter - LaTrobe Visual Arts Centre, Bendigo
2012 Watching - Not Looking, Helen Gory Gallery, Melbourne
2010 Mid Air - Bendigo Art Galerie
2009 Sleepwalker - Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne
2008 Elsewhere - Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne
2006 Skating on Thin Ice - Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne
2004 One City - Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne
2003 Pilgrimage & the City - LaTrobe University, Bendigo
300 Years of St Petersburg - Melbourne Town Hall
2002 Russia - Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne
group
2023 SUBSTRATE 23 - Tacit Art, Melbourne
Bound Pigment: Celebrating Paint - Tacit Galleries, Melbourne
2022 TACIT Still Life Prize - Tacit Art, Melbourne
Transition - Tacit Art, Melbourne
Tacit Voices - Tacit Art, Melbourne
2020 John Leslie Art Prize - Gippsland Art Gallery
20[2020] - Tacit Art, Melbourne
2019 The Affordable Art Fair - Melbourne
2018 Postcard Show - New Linden Art, Melbourne
2017 Arthur Guy Memorial Prize - Bendigo
2016 Re-group - The Artery, Warrnambool
Re-group - Waterfront Gallery, Geelong
2014 Rick Amor Drawing Prize - Art Gallery of Ballarat
Melbourne Now - National Gallery of Victoria
2013 Body Politic - LaTrobe Visual Arts Centre, Bendigo
Postcard Show - New Linden Art, Melbourne
2011 Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing - Adelaide Perry Gallery, Sydney
Postcard Show - New Linden Art, Melbourne
Picture This: Postcards and Letters Beyond Text - University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
2010 Paul Guest Prize - Bendigo Art Gallery
Rick Amor Drawing Prize - Art Gallery of Ballarat
Raft - Allan’s Walk Gallery, Bendigo
International Art Project - University of West England, Bristol
2009 Postcard Show - New Linden Art, Melbourne
Drawcard - National Art School, Sydney
2008 Robert Jacks Drawing Prize - Bendigo Art Gallery
Cross Talk - LaTrobe Visual Arts Centre, Bendigo
Drawcard - National Art School, Sydney
Contemporaneous - Wangaratta Art Gallery