Composer, performer and artist Edwin Burdis is mainly known for his groundbreaking art and experimental pop music bands, exploring a unique and extravagant fusion between art, music and sub-cultural references in various artistic personas. He has been a consistent part of the British performance scene since the millennium: he composed with the Turner-prize-winning artist Mark Leckey in the synth project ‘DonAteller’ and recently performed for Tate Modern’s No Soul for Sale.
For Back Sack and Crack Burdis presents a new series of compulsive cartoon-like drawings. Taking up the largest wall in the gallery space, the viewer is met with floor-to-ceiling luminous images, in Burdis’s signature sexually deviant style, of fleshy, lumpy characters conjured up from the artist’s daily observations and encounters. Directly referencing the latest in men’s hair removal procedures, the work is a reflection on the physical and spiritual homogenisation of today’s image-conscious society; in our search for a standardised perfection, the body has become yet another commodity.
Commentator as opposed to draughtsman, Burdis’s disregard for the language and history of drawing and painting is reflected in his arbitrary use of media. Rather he uses speed and sheer volume to express the weight of his concerns. The absence of a place to call home is one such source of his anxiety. In the opening night performance Home, Burdis offers his manifesto: a poetic rambling infused with nostalgia highlights the home as a source of stability and happiness from which everything else must follow. For the duration of the exhibition a documentation of Home and the remnants of the performance are re-invented as a video installation. Burdis’s absurd site-specific interventions respond directly to the tragicomic drawings in an attempt to juxtapose the bulk of his desires with their intangibility and the fragility of his presence in this space and city.
Burdis’s (b. Newcastle, 1974) recent exhibitions and performances include LongMeg, Be Glad For The Song Has No End, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, 2010; No Soul for Sale, Tate Modern, London 2010; LongMeg, Golden Zeiten, Haus De Kunst, Munich, 2010; LongMeg International Project Space, Bourneville, Birmingham, 2010; Flexi-man, Civic Room, London, 2010; A Relaxed Affair, BRICKHOUSE gallery, London, 2010; The Gold Whole, Vilma Gold, London 2009; “Garbage for Garbage”, a cultural exchange, Lincoln Plaza, New York, 2009 and INSIDE OUT, BROADWAY 1602, New York, 2009.
EXHIBITION DATES 9 SEPTEMBER-2 OCTOBER, WWW.MAXWIGRAM.COM
