Victor Burgin
Victor Burgin, The Convalescent (2020)
Archival inkjet print on Arches paper, 56 x 76 cm
Couples taking Western Christian marriage vows promise to be true “in sickness and in health”. Nothing is said about convalescence. No longer ill but not yet well, the convalescent inhabits a state of exception. In an interstitial space of confinement a universe of possibilities opens more often explored by writers than by doctors. Artists rarely visit this space but the painter James Tissot turned to it on more than one occasion. Rather than attempt an optical image of what cannot be seen I have preferred ‘ekphrasis’ – the verbal description of a work of visual art – to invite reflection on a state of being we have all known but only imperfectly recall.
Victor Burgin, The Convalescent (2020) Archival inkjet print on Arches paper 56×76 cm
Victor Burgin, recognised as one of the most influential artists of his generation, gained prominence in the late 1960s with the emergence of “Conceptual Art” which he helped shape. His work, at the time, was described as political because it touched on social inequalities and intentionally resisted commodification.
Throughout the 1970s his practice fused photography with text, leading to a genre now widely known as Photo-Text. Burgin’s work explored the interplay between images, turning to digital video in the 1990s, and later to 3D modelling. Throughout his work has explored politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis. The artist’s work is influenced by a variety of theorists, especially such thinkers as Sigmund Freud, Henri Lefebvre, André Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. Burgin is also himself a celebrated theorist who has published extensively on the subject of the still and moving image.
Burgin was born in Sheffield in 1941 and he has lived and worked in the USA, France as well as the UK. He studied at the Royal College of Art, London in 1965 and later received an MFA from Yale University in 1967. He has Honorary Degree of Doctor from both Liege University and Sheffield Hallam University.
The artist has exhibited internationally with solo exhibitions at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 2016; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, 2014; Museo di Fotografia Contemporane, Milan, 2008; MAK Foundation, Los Angeles, 2007, and Arnolfini, Bristol, 2002. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1986. Burgin has created site-specific commissions for the LSO Headquarters, Tate Gallery, the Cities of Marseilles among others. His work is in major museum collections, including MoMA, New York; Tate, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the British Council Art Collection.
