BIOgraphy
Robyn Burgess is an Australian painter/draughtswoman who lives and works in Melbourne. An established professional artist for three decades, she exhibited at Judith Pugh Gallery for many years before moving to Helen Gory Galerie in Melbourne where she exhibited for twenty years until the gallery’s recent closure. Burgess lectured in painting and drawing at La Trobe University, Melbourne for twenty years alongside raising her three daughters. Her curriculum vitae demonstrates the breadth of her visual art education at Melbourne University, Deakin University, Victorian College of the Arts and Monash University.
Travel and the foreign city have nourished the research of Burgess’ paintings and works on paper over the past 20 years. The city, its architecture and art have become the subject matter, but the notion of pilgrimage and travel simmer and brood as a metaphor for life…one realizes that the spiritual journey is the actual journey. At home in the studio the ideas and memories accumulate and wait. But as American artist Philip Guston implied, it is best when all your ideas finally leave and you are completely alone.
For Burgess, the closed flat space of the painted abstract surface will always remain a pictorial process where the medium may become the message and the narrative hovers or remains a secret. ‘We are the stories we tell and don’t tell.’
How one see’s the past through the lens of contemporary art is vital. After making large paintings for decades, Burgess has begun to make some smaller works and almost by osmosis these paintings have taught her when to abandon a large painting and risk hanging it unresolved or withheld …the texture of duration is halted.
In 2016 Burgess sailed beneath the pylons of the looming Westgate Bridge in a wintry Melbourne; subsequent drawings became paintings. “Sometimes you don’t have to travel very far at all.“ The bridge has long been a fascination for Burgess – its architectural structure, its history, its monumentality. She travelled to New York City three times to examine and draw The Brooklyn Bridge.
Recently, due to specific exhibitions and ideas, Burgess has combined two separate bodies of work. The architectural bridge sits alongside a webbed crinoline human structure; the latter evolved from research of Velasquez’ ‘Las Meninas ‘in the Prado, Spain. Both reveal elements such as the grid, shape, repetition, symmetry and rhythm. For Burgess, both demonstrate a different pace in the work whilst grappling with the structure of gesture and the layering of paint.
Burgess’ works harbour both calculated ideas and spontaneous impulses; she loves the physical properties of paint and she uses a lot of it.