Linda Burnham
Paintings
May 22 through July 3, 2004
Fredericks Freiser Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles artist, Linda Burnham. Burnham has shown widely in the United States including Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles and Finesilver Gallery, San Antonio. This will be the artist’s thirteenth solo exhibition and her third with Fredericks Freiser Gallery.
Linda Burnham’s painterly hybrids of Ab Ex, Minimalism, Pop and Color Field progress along their own idiosyncratic lines. Intellectually rigorous, sensuous, and immediate, Burnham creates multi-layered surfaces on found grounds such as tablecloths, curtains, and now, Indian saris. In the past she has combined figurative imagery with a variety of painting languages to address notions of gender and domesticity as they relate to labor, abstraction and ornamentation.
For this exhibition, Burnham turns to the Indian sari and its reference to the human body. She presents six large-scale paintings that introduce the motif of butterflies. Hundreds of butterflies have been rendered from painstaking hand-cut stencils, gessoed to a shallow relief, and then meticulously painted to resemble objects. The illusion is not one of the butterfly itself, but rather that of a decal or a sticker recalling the sentimentality of a young girl’s T shirt or the nostalgia for 60’s psychedelia. Butterflies are arranged as swarms, adorning the painted surface of the sari. The effect is an undeniably elaborate accumulation of painting techniques.
Here the process is not one of juxtaposing disparate elements and styles, but of a sincere attempt at creating hybrid forms that allow gesture, pattern and depiction to be used without hierarchy and the articulation of paint to invoke the philosophical practice of painting as a whole.
Fredericks Freiser Gallery is located at 504 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm. For further information and/or photographs please contact the gallery by telephone at (212) 633-6555, fax at (212) 367-9502, or email fredericksfreiser@nyc.rr.com. Find more information on Linda Burnham or any of our artists at www.fredericksfreisergallery.com.