Kathe Burkhart

Kathe Burkhart

Love is Just a Four-Letter Word

October 8 through November 7, 2020

Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to present an exhibition by Kathe Burkhart. Ongoing since 1982, Kathe Burkhart's Liz Taylor Series has evolved into a serial performative life work that draws from traditional worldviews involving presumed emotional "truths" put forth in painting and cinema. Its graphic images cut deeply both ways — for Liz and those depicted around her; for the artist and viewers alike. In works on canvas, images of Liz Taylor drawn from film stills, press and archival sources are overlaid with singular typographic profanities to provide a seemingly vast platform in which Burkhart addresses feminist resistance, female dominance, and sexual power. Love is Just a Four-Letter Word includes works on canvas from the series ranging from 2007-2016, as well as works on paper depicting the star from 2005-2015. Her glow-in-the-dark painting “S’nuff: from the Liz Taylor Series (Ash Wednesday)” from 2016 will be installed in the gallery’s 24th Street window for day and night viewing.

This selection of works on canvas, many being shown in New York for the first time, were among the last works made in Burkhart’s Williamsburg studio before being forced out by gentrification of the neighborhood. Further narrative links are enhanced by groupings and sequencing of works such as “S’nuff: from the Liz Taylor Series (Ash Wednesday),” with “Bitch Goddess: from the Liz Taylor Series (Look magazine, 1970),” 2015, and “Biohazard: from the Liz Taylor Series,” 2016, all of which were made around the conclusion of the artist’s treatment for the Hepatitis C Virus. Works such as “Transbian: from the Liz Taylor Series (Ash Wednesday),” 2015, “Whip it Out: from the Liz Taylor Series (Reflections in a Golden Eye),” 2018, “Whore: from the Liz Taylor Series (The Only Game in Town),” 2013, “Pervert: from the Liz Taylor Series (X, Y and Z),” 2007, and “Love Diary: from the Liz Taylor Series (movie magazine cover),” 2011, all comprise representations of female deviance. The title of the exhibition makes reference to a Bob Dylan song recorded by Joan Baez in the late ‘60s, recalling a memory from her youth in West Virginia, specifically her understanding of the song’s lyrics not as a love song, but a lament for the disparity between left wing 'movement men' and the second wave feminist movement. Burkhart has noted of her choice of Liz Taylor that “she is the actress who always portrays herself,” a notion that figures broadly into the sense, in Burkhart’s work, that Taylor’s image is a stand-in for the artist — one who is required to perform feats of autobiography and gender, but consistently and aggressively overrules the scripts that are handed to her.

When, in hundreds of paintings, the image of Liz Taylor is invoked, a sizable register that includes her beauty is correlated with otherwise abrasive, aggressive, histrionic, and unfettered attributes to deliver a form of debasement administered through deconstructions of iconic representations of the star, combined with graphic direct addresses. Like one of her favorite Liz Taylor movies, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Burkhart brings us foul language as a device that ruptures too-lengthy silences, deploying anti-formalist strategies to address various systems of oppression, including language. As in Edward Albee’s play, psychological sport, verbal taunting, and