Modernity has spurred radical shifts in everyday life, arriving in a dizzying sequence of advancement-upon-advancement: cars, airplanes, an endless array of synthetic psychotropic drugs, microwaves, the polio vaccine, nearly ubiquitous internet access, and a critical intervention for millions of Americans: the mass-produced hamburger. Adam Lavigne’s debut solo exhibition, “Hamburgers Today,” confers, through sculpture and painting, the hamburger its rightful position as America’s premier commodity object.
Lavigne’s work, on view at Katherine Bernhardt’s Dragon, Crab, and Turtle Gallery from November 2nd through April 2025, features fast-food burgers derived from billboards, mail ads, and drive-thru posters. The pieces remind the viewer that those objects and images most frequently encountered—most accessible and pervasive—stultify in the collective imagination, remaining concealed behind the diminution of cultural saturation. A burger, with its multilayered colors and implicit history, is reduced to “just” a burger—overlooked beyond its utilitarian function as a quick meal.
“Hamburgers Today” defies any dismissiveness of the mundane and prompts a re-examination of the burger as an aesthetic object. Like many artists, Lavigne stages a confrontation between the high-art context of a gallery and an object of popular culture. The exhibition asks the observer: What is lost by neglecting cultural populist aesthetics and what is gained when those images are extricated from their promotional settings? To answer that central question, I talked to Lavigne about the burger-image, his inventive approaches to painting and sculpture, and the continuity between this exhibition and his preceding work.
Teddy Duncan: The unavoidable question: Why did you choose hamburgers as your subject—is it purely the aesthetic appeal of the burger’s formal qualities or was there something else that you found compelling about the burger-image?
Adam Lavigne: I originally was interested in making paintings based on the big burger billboards you see on the highway. I always thought it would be cool to have a painting of a burger that size. When I started making them, I liked how every photo of a burger was composed with so much care. They have an ugly quality that I like. There’s something about advertising in general that’s inherently ugly. Burgers in particular are just not very attractive until someone goes to extreme lengths to make them look attractive.
Teddy: Is each piece a different burger being represented, or are these distinct re-iterations of the same burger?
Adam: Most of the burgers in the show are based on actual photos from ads of specific burgers. The sculptures are not based on any real fast food chain burgers, those are more like re-iterations of the same idea just scaled up each time.
What was your reference material for the burgers? Are these depictions of actual, physical burgers you purchased, or are these based on advertisement images?
They’re mostly based on advertisements, the Sausage Egg and Cheese Bagel is from a billboard, the Ghost Pepper Whopper was an ad I got in the mail, and the Impossible White Castle was from a poster in the drive-thru. If I see one in an ad and I like the colors and composition, I would use it for a painting.
Stylistically, there is fidelity to the burger-image—these pieces do directly resemble hamburgers—yet they are simultaneously not in the register of objective realism. There is some play at the margins with the image, for instance, the googly eyes on the sculptures or the streaks of paint remaining on the canvas and the blended colors. Why did you take this quasi-real approach to representing hamburgers?
I like the qualities you’re describing, for me that’s what it looks like when I try to make something. I wanted to make paintings of burgers. I think I like the way paint looks, probably more than I like the subject in a painting. When I look at a painting I’m usually not very interested in the subject of the painting. I’m more interested in what it probably felt like to make the painting. If I see a painting that is laborious or hyper-real, it’s harder for me to relate to.
How did you construct the canvases into the precise burger shape and why did you want the canvases to be shaped rather than the conventional approach of painting on a pre-constructed rectangular canvas?
The shaped canvases are made from sheets of plywood. I drew the burger from a reference and cut it with a jigsaw. For the larger ones, I would stack multiple sheets for strength. Then I would stretch the canvas over that wood frame and gesso it. I love building the canvases and having the freedom to make them in whatever shape I want. The shapes always fit nicely on the wall.
Do you see continuity between “Hamburgers Today” and your past exhibitions, such as your dual show with your wife, “Heaven is a Place on Earth”?
I do, this is an idea I’ve had for a long time. For the shows with Anna, we would select subjects and styles of work based on what we were interested in at the time. Paradise was a recurring subject for us. Aliens, vacations, time, the sun, and the moon. We had a show called “Synesthetes Breakfast” that had some food imagery in it and even a burger painting. Heaven is a Place on Earth was about the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. I could see that relating to this exhibition somehow. I can also see that building my own shaped canvases will probably always be part of my paintings.
A large part of this exhibition seems to be predicated on recontextualization: Taking the burger from the populist, fast-food menu, and re-situating it in the lauded white walls of a gallery. How would you want someone who walks into the gallery to view this shift of context?
I wanted the subject to be kind of boring and ugly. I hope that the shock of recontextualization has kind of worn off for burgers. I feel like burgers could be the new flowers. The burgers in this show remind me of flowers or landscape paintings. That’s how I see them, an infinitely paintable subject.
Adam Lavigne, Hamburgers Today, November 2nd – April 2025, Dragon, Crab, and Turtle Gallery
