6/12/2007

Kathe Burkhart

35 comments:

Painter said...

Kathe Burkhart @
Alexander Gray Associates
526 West 26th Street #1019
New York, NY 10001

Anonymous said...

alex, pull your head out

DarthFan said...

Some of this stuff is up for auction soon by Sothebys - as is a bunch of german stuff (Immendorf, Damien Hirst) and some photography. Seems like a bargain compared to the astronomical prices for the current algal boom.

So its more astro-turf than grassroots. But leaders must lead so that followers can follow right?

Loss leaders are when you bring people in with 10 cent coffee and then get em for a five dollar slice of pie a la mode. Dig it.

I like the vintage palette - teal and red-orange with the burgundy and black (I hope its not the jpg).

Toulouse Lautrecian a way, probably because the notes of japonisme that inflect this sort of thing if you want to go back that far the Moulin ROuge was a real place you know? Same for a Patrick Nagel - though he did it for a Playboy audience rather than an S and M crowd.

Nagel is way more square - sort of acid wash preppie mall coture and members only or leather jacket, where this is vintage velour mod or a bit goth/punk. And of course feminist where nagle is more mens interest magazine.

Why doesnt Elle or Young Debutante design more around this kind of work?

The shoes match the walls, which is a common trick to draw the eye around the image with a color. Im blind to form echoes right now - too much design.

just saw Being John Malkovitch again so maybe this makes more sense than the last one and its cysticfibropolioslcerosis mannerist Chagall dance routine - at least thats my read.

heres some theory though

DarthFan said...

Golden lyre headboard
Tarot Cards
Noir-ish

I couldn't pin it down.

CAP said...

I couldn't even get any date, dimensions or medium.

zipthwung said...

Kathe Burkhart
Blueballs: from the Liz Taylor Series (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)
2007
Acrylic, digital prints, composition leaf on canvas
72" x 108"

CAP said...

Is there a url for that stuff?
Couldn't find anything like that on the Gray website.

nat said...

Those curlie-cue bed posts in the foreground cement my humble opinion that this painting sucks... Oh, and the hands....

The pink painting on the wall looks better than the actual painting--Whoops! don't out-do yourself with your own painting within a painting-- Rule of Thumb.

Is there an "idea" behind it that is supposed to redeem this stuff?

And is Hirst now an honorary German???

zipthwung said...

here

If you cant see the text on the right then it may be your browser - the page uses css and tables though so I dunno.

Elizabeth Taylor’s multiple personae—actress, vixen, Hollywood royalty, serial wife and divorcĂ©e, party girl, charitable humanitarian, entrepreneur, rebel, dominant woman—acts as a media-based mirror of contemporary female identity. For Kathe Burkhart, Taylor becomes a doppelganger in her paintings, in which tabloid, paparazzi shots and publicity stills from Taylor’s films are emblazoned with profanities that reclaim female sexuality and power. “I locate my position as oppositional on several levels: as a critique of representation, particularly that of women and also as a rupturing of idiomatic packaging/
presentation devices,” notes the artist.

The text is a similar strategy to when they draw penises on the posters in the subwqay right?

zipthwung said...

yes damien is a german. THis is because like other artists born in the shadow of Germany, he sees life with a lense unclouded by delusions of immortality, disillusioned of illusionment, refusing to be anything more than a meat 0uppet playing a prescribed but not altogether proscribed role. Yes, courage has a face in art, and its number is 666.

For a list of other roles, please read the greek plays, they are all good, but the tragedies are more true.

Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus - you will find that plots repeat themselves throughout history, so dont be dissapointed if the next movie has the same vapid sex kitten pouting out at you while reciting some chestnut from ancient Athens.

Alas poor Damien! I knew him, a man of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy....

arebours said...

off topic-really look forward to seeing Sarah Peters work @ Plus Ultra when Im in town nxt week-her work is refreshingly goofy and light and ego-less-

None said...
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zipthwung said...

i was reading nancy bakers blog - shes gonna be interviewed in half an hour 3:00 wednesday.

tune in turn on use a phone!

2008 summer of HATE

no-where-man said...

bit of a lesbian! hot you dropped a gay bomb on me so is this a double helix or a double entendre? i love it from the "bad hands" to the "bad pallet"

zipthwung said...

"Suddenly last summer" is on Cable.

Is there a Liz season or is it just a coincidence?

CAP said...

I think Monroe’s exact words were “Keep that dike away from me!”

But since some roles are obviously more classical or real than others here, it’s a shame Burkhart couldn’t keep the picture more real as well. Trading on sub-Kruger slogans and lame tracings from Suddenly-Last-Summer-Pussy-On-A-Hot-Tin-Roof-With-Fiddler-Or-Was-It-Something-I-Butterfield-8? - end up looking like a 70s poster of Che or Community Service announcements.

Color co-ordinates just aren’t leading anywhere much less back to Warhol or ‘period’ unless you want to put the effort into working the long black line instead of riding it. There’s one role Burkhart’s lecturing won’t cover for.

When it comes to all that flattened scroll work and urban heraldry give me Kerry James Marshall in an early 90s mood any day.

nat said...

This is like someone who you meet at a party who makes charming pop-culture references and you have a few drinks and end up fucking and that goes on for a few months but the charm wears off and you end up like, "wtf, I like pussy(or dick or anus or what-have-you), but enough 'Family Guy' references-- I don't even want to hang around that person for even 5 minutes"... then you think about their sexual organs when you masturbate for 3 more months and finally it seems so ridiculous that you think if this is what sex is then screw it!

I mean, fucking is a metaphor for painting anyways and that's how the above should be read.

zipthwung said...

nat maybe you should write
about these sexy paintings. How does Cecily Brown feel about the pleasure of paint? I'm sure its just an academic exercise in all-over figure-ground pos-neg physicality.

For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction

zipthwung said...

Amen.

youth--less said...

all-over figure-ground pos-neg physicality

what else is there?

richard liked it

zipthwung said...

Oh yeah, soutine is king right? And lest we forget, deKooning.
More women should really sling the mud around though- and more men too - I know its expensive as all get out - maybe make pots out of rolled slabs of good river clay.

Like when Rocky Balboa slams his fists into the sides of bloody beef - thats the ticket! Iconic!

Its not the sixties nor even the seventies anymore. I see a return to the earth, and earthenwares. Do not go gently into this good night, don't let the bed bugs bite, reason, be a monster, and forgive us our trespasses, for thine is the power and the vanity, and whimpering, we take our hubris in hand; snicker, snack.

Sven said...

d hirst: My favourite painters are Goya, Soutine and Bacon. Paintings are about truth and belief; it’s not about ability. Ability comes with practice. But belief, truth and guts don’t come with anything. You just take whatever ability you’ve got and you try and communicate something. And that’s the great thing about painting.

zipthwung said...

"thats the first time I've seena book remaindered in the kindling section"

-Woody Allen

poppy said...

Damien Hirst also says about painting that you must first learn how to paint from reality life?/ before you do anything else,..like I guess he meant from photos, and I guess he meant exactly what he was doing at the time,..

that guy is a crackpot when it comes to painting..

None said...
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CAP said...

Whatever else you want to say about Cecily Brown’s more sexual paintings – those from around the turn of the century - (and talk about off- topic!) at least she doesn’t resort to name-calling as token feminism when privately the word is men just don’t figure, dig?
That’s just hypocrisy.
Dressing it up flat and plodding in yesterday’s icons doesn’t make it any realer.
Looks like Burkhart is saving her ‘real’ efforts for the novels.

CAP said...

When men figure privately they is never the same.
And you don’t need to be a woman or even a feminist to figure or be figured for privacy, primacy or maternity on that.

youth--less said...

why can't u menz take a joke?

CAP said...

Who says we're not laughing?

nat said...

Yeah zip, I'd rather make-out with cicely brown than burkhart, but I'd probably hop in bed with rembrandt before soutine-- soutine would be all passion and enthusiasm but it takes a little more, ya know, to satisfy a girl... then again, every "girl" is different.

Apparently Burkhart's work is theoretically informed.
I'm sure our private pleasures are intwined in the nexus of power... blah blah... the Nazi SM scene I did with a Jewish girl the other week being a case in point....

But still,as "image-makers" artists are marginal to the culture at best and the art-market has incoporated "political art", feminist or otherwise, as well as anything.

I dunno what my point is--- Start an advertising agency or a lobbying firm for frick-sake.

I'll take my paintings like my women, all juicy and hot-to-trot. Oh, and I like Agnes Martin so maybe I'm being a bit facetious.

nat said...

And Zip, Ted Mineo is bringing Caspar David Friedrich, not the malls, to the gallery. And Satan is a Lesbian is almost as good as a Gerome painting.

zipthwung said...

Mineo, oh yes, the Kantian sublime of an Orange Julius stand stuck in ground mist in the cypress swamps.

Like an eternal anachronism of the spottted kind. Standing stone monuments to the inchoate longing of the wicker men.

Pastiche as pasticheurs can. Cake. Cake. Bake. Lake. Fake. Rake. Progress, progress, pilgrim.

zipthwung said...

nation of swine!

Painter said...

My most recent post is only showing up if you click on June 2007 in the archive section. I don't know why.

youth--less said...

forgot to say thx to u painter for posting an artist influenced by ros drexler. yr so good 2 me