You are here: home | exhibitions | balthasar burkhard

Balthasar Burkhard

Teatro Ariosto - Sala Verdi
30 April - 7 June 2009
curated by Elio Grazioli

 

RICONOSCIMENTI

Balthasar Burkhard’s main problem seems to be the relationship between part and whole, particular and detail, maybe also between object and (its) name. The subjects of his pictures are legs, wings, parts of faces, fragments of city and country landscapes, but also whole bodies and figures, but which in turn could be defined as “whole parts”: photography always cuts, isolates, chops, decontextualises and frames. Every image is in fact a part, but at the same time highlights, details and shows more clearly. Burkhard is in fact difficult to categorise within a style or a movement, and his particularity seems to be due to the intensity of his pictures. His look is a still one, centred and concentrated, which has identified its object and scrutinises it in every detail. Here time is stopped and eternal, in the sense that it reminds us of everything, it has an infinite vanishing point, and does not represent the present but pushes our thoughts toward total questions.

BIOGRAPHY

Balthasar Burkhard was born in 1944 in Bern, where he lives and works. In the late 1960s he entered the contemporary art world when, as an official photographer, he documented the exhibitions running at the Kunsthalle in Bern, then directed by Harald Szeemann. Balthasar Burkhard’s first personal exhibitions, in Chicago in 1977 and in New York in 1979, show the influence of a long period spent in the United States (1975-80) during which his photographs showed subjects with accentuated plasticity, mainly in black and white. Adopting a tight, front focal point, between the 1980s and 1990s Burkhard photographed fragments of bodies, fair animals and landscapes. The exhibition of two monumental nudes at the Kunsthalle in Basel, for a personal exhibition in 1983, marked a time of change in his work. In this period, the series dedicated to the aerial shots of metropolitan landscapes in Mexico, Los Angeles and Tokyo was taken. His stay in Japan, in 1987, after which he gave up large formats in favour of closer, more intimate shots was crucial in his poetics. In 1992 he did his first heliographies in Saint-Prex. In 1997 the Rath Museum in Geneva held his first important retrospective exhibition. In 1999 he participated in the first ‘Biennale di Venezia’ directed by Harald Szeemann, where he presented a series of photographic tributes, including Normandie (1995) and L’Origine du Monde (1998). He made many tributes to painting, from Duchamp to Courbet. Numerous institutions have dedicated retrospective exhibitions to him, including the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Grenoble, the Kunstmuseum in Bern in 2004, the Muséeum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Strasbourg in 2008 and the Jenisch Museum in Vevey in 2008-2009.

PHOTOGALLERY

Burkhard

B. Burkhard, L'Éléphant, 1996 B. Burkhard, Normandie, 1995 B. Burkhard, Namibia, 2000

INFORMATION

Info
Teatro Ariosto - Sala Verdi
piazza della Vittoria - Reggio Emilia
tel. 0522 451152 - 456249

Hours
Opening 30 April at 18.00
From 1 to 3 May from 10.00 to 23.00
From 5 May to 7 June: from Tuesdays to Fridays from 18.00 to 23.00; Saturdays, Sundays and festivals from 10.00 to 23.00

MEETING WITH THE ARTIST

Friday 1 May 2009 at 10.00 - piazza Casotti
Il tempo dell’immagine.
Elio Grazioli presents Balthasar Burkhard and Joan Fontcuberta