VICTOR BURGIN US77
26 Jan – 6 Apr 2013
Opening: Saturday, 26 January 2013, 4 p.m.
Introduction: Prof. Klaus Honnef
The artists Victor Burgin and Peter Downsbrough will be present.
Opening hours: Tue-Fri 11-6, Sat 12-6 p.m. and by appointment
These quasi-typical American landscapes comment on the social and cultural changes in American society in the 1970s, while the photographic style locates the individual in a media-dominated world. US 77 is the first series to feature an aspect of Victor Burgin’s oeuvre that becomes very relevant in his later work: a critical examination of women being fetishized as objects of male fantasies.
Since the 1960s Victor Burgin is an influential conceptual artist and theorist. Burgin was born in Sheffield in 1941 and became widely known for his conceptual photo/text works, which have often been discussed in the context of the Art & Language movement. In numerous essays and monographs he situates his work within a semiotic, historical, and psychological context, showing influences of theorists and philosophers such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and the French structuralists. Burgin’s aesthetic incorporates motifs from psychoanalysis and structuralism and oscillates between political conflict and aesthetic desire.