Robert Burnier

Tommaso Corvi-Mora is delighted to present a solo exhibition of new work by Robert Burnier, his first at the gallery. The artist has written recently:

“I regard the folded and compressed forms of my work as phenomena of material and choice, retaining a record of their own emergence in how the material holds touch. Each move is informed by another, and color transforms this sculptural experience. While there are sources of inspiration, the process is still a new problem in and of itself, not primarily a representation. To relive each sculptural work through color allows me to ask questions of becoming, identity, encounter and transformation. They are more experiences than abstractions, seeking a parallel dance between diasporic African and Western cosmologies.

With these works, I continue my project of interpreting the hues of ancient African, Mediterranean and Mesopotamian objects. The Bull’s head from Xerxes’ Hundred Columns Hall, the Qustul incense burner from Nubia, and faience ceramics of ancient Egypt, for example, are housed at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures in my hometown of Chicago. My frequent visits there have deeply affected my sense of color, prompting considerations of its relationship to the movement of peoples.

The titles for my work, in Esperanto, are fragments drawn from the objects I’ve observed, the mythologies I consider, and quotations from Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s poetry. I see his work as contemplating what he calls the chthonic forces of the cosmos, for which culture is a response, if not a representation. The fundamental nature of this response, an emergence of material and spirit in co-creation, is an abiding concern for my practice.”

Robert Burnier received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 after having previously graduated with a BS in Computer Science from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania in 1991. He has been a Departmental Specialist Technician for European Painting and Sculpture at The Art Institute of Chicago since 2006 and serves as a board member for Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Heaven Gallery, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid (where he was a founding member). Recent exhibitions include blank projects (Cape Town, SA), Massey Klein Gallery (New York, NY), David B. Smith Gallery (Denver, CO), and The Arts Club of Chicago (Chicago, IL). Robert Burnier is Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.