Robert BurnierOf No Particular King

I employ models and structures that exist prior to the formal choices I make, giving those spaces over to imaginative alteration. Materials offer resistance and guide my path. The specific and the given are historical facts to contend with as an artwork emerges. Municipal hues are chosen that signify collective action and reciprocity, inviting subjective response and the possibility of pleasure.

All aspects of this site are acknowledged, built upon, or circumvented. They convene to arrive at a form. And yet these elements, while involved, do not determine; the sculpture stands autonomously and as go between. Structure yields to wind, rain, and natural forces in order to persist. A faceless king, boundaries of a city’s conception, a devotional procedural picture.

The materials and colors are those of construction and safety barriers, emblems of engagement in a concerted activity and also a measure of protection within it. These can be simultaneously signs and their own manifestation, constructive action as its own best advocate. They might be distributed, fragmented, everyday symbols in the manner of the Sienese Commune, building an iconography of values, going beyond ruling personalities, and unalterable doctrine.

Robert Burnier (American, b. 1969) lives and works in Chicago. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in painting and drawing in 2016. He also holds a BS in Computer Science from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania (1991). Recent group exhibitions include Jenny from the Color Block, curated by Eric Ruschman, Art Academy of Cincinnati, OH (2016); Imaginary Landscapes, curated by Allison Glenn, Chicago Urban Art Society (2015); Ghost Nature, curated by Caroline Picard, at Gallery 400, Chicago, and La Box, Bourges, France (2014); and The Chicago Effect: Redefining the Middle at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, (2014). His most recent solo exhibition, So That Justice Should Be a Tyrant, was on view at Andrew Rafacz Gallery through June 2017. Independent Curators International commissioned a series of works that were presented at NADA Miami (2014) and NADA New York (2015) respectively.

His work has been exhibited in solo and curated presentations at art fairs in Chicago, Miami, New York, Mexico City, and Copenhagen. He is included in numerous public and private collections.