| Mitchell Algus Gallery | |||||||||||
| Kathe Burkhart Paintings February 8 – March 3, 2003 |
Press Release | ||||||||||
| The Mitchell Algus Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by Kathe Burkhart opening on Saturday February 8 and continuing through Saturday March 8, 2003. A reception for the artist will be held on Thursday February 13 from 6 to 8 pm. This exhibition is being held in association with a show of Kathe Burkhart’s text pieces, Numbers and Letters, at Participant, Inc., 95 Rivington Street, from February 7 through March 2, and of drawings, Works on Paper, at Schroeder Romero, 173A North 3 Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn from February 28 through April 6. Few artists’ art has as bluntly cathartic a demeanor as Kathe Burkhart’s. Spitting graphically brusque verbal bricks and looking like visual Tourette’s, Burkhart’s paintings clear the air of the unstated. Of course, this is not to suggest that Burkhart’s art is anything less than subtle. Just that its subtlety is not immediately obvious. Drawing source materials from film stills, magazine covers and the tabloids, Burkhart gives us her living, force-of-nature Doppelgänger — her second self —Elizabeth Taylor. These portraits of Taylor/Burkhart are overlaid by pert, impudently poignant phrases. The results are both obvious and unusual: powerful, rightly conflicted images of aggressive awareness; purgative broadsides of a very certain type. Burkhart explores sexual power and female dominance. In this way her work represents an important transition in feminist practice; away from the “woman’s work” aesthetics and self-defining representation of the 1970s, beyond the appropriation and subversion of cultural commonplaces in the 1980s and moving towards an unabashed, freewheeling wielding of power’s free floating mantle. In fact, the widely circulated phrase “bad girl,” which in the 1990s gave rise to an important eponymous exhibition at The New Museum, was first coined by Burkhart in a 1990 FlashArt interview with Helena Kontova. Kathe Burkhart received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from CalArts in the early 1980s. After moving to New York, she gained notoriety with a memorable FlashArt cover — and the above noted interview — showing a star-shaped painting of Elizabeth Taylor from Cleopatra with the ambiguous, self-referential term “Starfucker.” (The magazine distributor refused distribution of the issue.) In addition to her paintings and drawings Burkhart has written three novels which have been published in the United States and France. Her most recent, cited by the French feminist critics and theoreticians Hélène Cixous and Annie Ernaux as “absolutely remarkable” and “a terrible and excellent book” respectively , is being published in English in association with the artist’s exhibition of text pieces at Participant, Inc. Since the 1980s Burkhart has also produced numerous installation pieces and video works, shown most recently in Pop Patriotism at Momenta Art in Brooklyn. Burkhart participated in the Aperto section of the 1993 Venice Biennale and has had numerous works acquired by Jan Hoet fro SMAK in Ghent, Belgium. A screening of Kathe Burkhart’s videos will take place on February 23, and a reading from her new novel will be held on March 2, both at Participant, Inc. at 8:00 pm. |
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