Sigrid Burton
Sigrid Burton is an American painter, long based in New York City, whose semi-abstract work is known for its use of expressive, atmospheric color fields and enigmatic allusions to natural and cultural realms. Burton has had solo exhibitions in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Osaka, including at Artists Space and the Michael C. Rockefeller Arts Center, and been included in shows at A.I.R. Gallery, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, and the Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rockefeller Foundation, and Palm Springs Desert Museum, and has been reviewed in Arts Magazine, Arts & Antiques, Jung Journal, Chicago Tribune and LA Weekly. Writers most frequently observe that Burton's atmospheric works recall artists such as J.M.W. Turner, Odilon Redon, Pierre Bonnard and Mark Rothko, as well as the light of her native California. Art & Antiques described her approach as "chromatic expressionism" in which color is "her undisputed protagonist"; Peter Frank observed, "The dialectic between color and form has always inflected, even impelled" Burton's painting, with color the more omnipresent element, and form the more persistent. Art historian William C. Agee wrote, "The domains she explores meet, intersect, fuse, and then disappear, like apparitions, in liquid pools of mist and color. Her pictorial odyssey refers simultaneously to both a higher order, a timeless cosmic vastness, as well as to a private, interior world, abounding in personal histories and memories." Burton has lived and worked in Pasadena, California since 2013.
Life and career
Burton was born in Pasadena, California to Gene and Betye Burton, both enthusiastic art patrons. She went to Westridge School for Girls, where performance artist Barbara T. Smith was a teacher and mentor; Burton assisted her on the well-known performance, Ritual Meal, and participated in Allan Kaprow's Fluids. After attending the University of California, Berkeley, she completed a BA degree at Bennington College, Vermont, studying with Pat Adams, Carol Haerer and Sidney Tillim. Burton moved to New York City to work as a studio assistant to painter Helen Frankenthaler, and subsequently, Jules Olitski; she assisted Frankenthaler on the painted-tile series, Thanksgiving Day, exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum. During that time she began exhibiting professionally, in group shows at the American Academy of Arts and Letters and solo exhibitions at Artists Space and Salander O'Reilly in New York, Martha White, Ivory Kimpton, Patricia Hamilton Gallery and Hokin Kaufman, among others.Travel—to Italy, China and India, among many places—has been a key source of inspiration and evolution in Burton's work. In 1994, she was awarded an Indo-American Senior Research Fellowship from the Fulbright Program to study the meaning and use of color in traditional Indian art and ritual forms. She followed with postgraduate work in the South Asian Studies at Columbia University in New York City. Burton's work has been used for covers for Janice Moore Fuller's book of poems, Sex Education and The Poetry Project, and appeared in The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Interior Design, and House Beautiful, hanging in featured homes of collectors.
In addition to her art career, Burton has taught for and served on the Board of Directors for LEAP in the New York City school system, volunteered and wrote a manual for AIDS service organizations, and been appointed to the Manhattan Community Board 2. In 2013, she returned to Pasadena with her husband, Max Brennan, where she serves on the Board of Trustees for the Westridge School.
Work
Burton has written that light and landscape, travel, antecedents in Western painting, and Indian art have been key inspirations for her work. She draws literally and figuratively from the natural world of botanical, biological and weather phenomena, the structures of macro and micro cosmologies, and systems such as writing. Her range of influences includes Buddhist cave and Indian miniature paintings, Jain cosmological diagrams, and artists from the Renaissance to modernists to the California Light and Space movement. William C. Agee wrote, "these references reveal themselves slowly, giving her art a sense of duration, a sense of a long journey through space, time, and memory," as if one "were moving between worlds, cultures, and centuries," as well as physical or spiritual states of creation and dissolution. Color, in particular, has been a foundation of her practice, from the early influence of Kandinsky's work and conception of the transcendent power of abstract art to her later studies of Indian aesthetic theories.Early Painting (1973–1995)
Burton's early acrylic paintings of the 1970s, featuring broad swaths and pooled abstract color, were indebted to Color field painting and traditions running through Rothko, Matisse and Impressionism, back to Titian. By the late 1970s, however, she felt constrained by the remoteness of formalism and looked to artists who merged abstraction with direct or referential imagery, such as Lois Lane and Terry Winters. Rethinking her working method, she switched to oil paint, worked upright using brushes on stretched canvasses rather than on the floor, and incorporated drawing that broadly referenced recognizable, more personal content. Chicago Tribune critic Alan Artner called the new work "promising" and "lyrical," noting that its linear, gestural elements and areas of thick paint departed from Frankenthaler's work, while the color and feeling evoked Burton's California roots. The Louisville Courier Journal described the work as active and exuberant, with "a varied and resourceful color vocabulary" and fleeting hints of landscape.After an art residency at the Bellagio Study Center in Italy in 1985, Burton experimented with painted borders and frames within the picture plane, as well as abstracted biomorphic elements, color, and light derived from observed nature and landscape studies. Arts Magazine critic Tony Towle wrote that her "large, lush and colorful" oils had a richness suggesting pastels; calling them "mysteriously semi-abstract," he contrasted Burton's increased figuration—suggesting "timeless, overgrown gardens" —with her vigorous brushwork, high-key palette, and multi-colored borders, which heightened an opposing sense of ambiguity and unreality. Towle likened the work to that of Arshile Gorky—without his torment—calling the result "a tranquil, dreamlike landscape" that felt primeval yet lacked menace.” Burton worked in this semi-abstract fashion into the 1990s, often alluding to landscapes and objects from her ongoing travels.
Mature Painting (1995– )
After an extended stay in India in 1995, during a time of personal loss as well as the AIDS crisis, Burton again re-evaluated her art and its ability to express the totality of experience. She emerged with darker, brooding works more rooted to everyday experience and memory, and rich in natural and multicultural allusions that appeared and dispersed amid hazy, color-saturated surfaces. Often, this work used implicit grids and loosely constructed, imagined or canonical Indian color systems as a starting point. Critics described her approach as intentional yet ambiguous, and mysterious with a "calculated inexactitude" that obscured distinctions between figure and ground, plant and animal. In 1999, Peter Frank observed, "form asserts itself in the midst of her luminous, translucent clouds of color, giving unanticipated backbone to otherwise invertebrate masses of hue and tone." William Agee noted how Burton's expansive, atmospheric spaces are "brought back to earth by passages of drawing" that allude to quotidian life and world culture; he compared her fusion of these pictorial opposites to that of Matisse.In 2001, the pharmaceutical firm, Merck & Company, commissioned Burton to create a suite of site-specific paintings for the concourse of its global headquarters in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey; the colorful installation represented her first permanent environment of works in direct dialogue with one another. Throughout the 2000s, Burton has continued to work in modulated monochrome fields with sparse organic forms, blurring the line between image and pure abstraction. Reviewing a 2005 exhibition, Peter Frank wrote, Burton's "canvasses enfold the eye in baths of light and color," depicting "some half-remembered, half-imagined experience, a dream so aqueous, it might have been dreamt in the womb.” Burton's paintings in the 2010s are increasingly informed by astronomy. These works, such as Asterisms, are less focused on figure-ground relationships, and more abstract, with greater depth of field and dense, layered gestural drawing that has a scrawled, calligraphic quality.