Michael Brick and Gina Burdass

What you see is what you get?

9 June - 21 July 2010

Go to Brick Homepage

Go to Burdass Homepage

Online Catalogue

Michael Brick, Untitled 2010, 52 x 30.5cm

When artists first produced abstract work like Brick and Burdass, it was a reductivist urge to remove narrative and meaning. As was famously said by Frank Stella in an interview, “What you see is what you get.” The shape and the colour are what they are.

Forty years on, our references have changed and we have become a more sophisticated viewing public. Minimal the abstract work of Brick and Burdass might be, but arbitrary it is not. It is less confrontational than some might expect. Perhaps collaborative is a better description, in the way that if the artist were standing beside the viewer looking at the work the artist might say “Interesting, isn’t it?” as though you were both seeing the piece and feeling its resonance for the first time.

Gina Burdass, 2008, Two greens,white,orange,yellow, 66x56cm

The colours used by Brick reflect his interest in pigments and their origins. He will use any number of greys to make a particular black. Any number of layers of different pigments are used to achieve a certain effect. Brick’s obsession in the colour is that of an alchemist. It is about the pigment, it is about the fact of colour.

Burdass’s work is more about colour as that which you see, rather than the chemical roots of the pigment. It is about drawing with colour. When drawing with colour one is concerned about the spatiality (hue) and weight (tone) of marks (or colour).Each panel of colour represents an aspect of the drawing. Each panel is enmeshed with the other panels in the work to complete the “drawing”. A sense of balance and movement is the end point of Burdass’s paintings.

Michael Brick, Untitled 2009-10, 61 x 122cm

Both artists, however, use black and white in the same way. Black and white represent colourless margins or borders that visually interfere with the pattern of colour we see. In Brick’s case this interference allows the sculptural quality of the work to come through. In Burdass’s case the use of black and white locks in the relationship between the panels of colour, giving the work a concrete unalterable presence.

Gina Burdass, 2010, Nine Squares Series.10, 61 x 61cm