Kathe Burkhart

PROVENANCE: Courtesy of the Artist

Since 2006, I’ve been shooting digital photographs of nude people at clothing optional beaches. Along with other serial work, this one shares the sensation of stopped time and captures a frozen moment. These portraits of nude people at public beaches confront the viewer with moments in which public and private cross over into the same space. The photographs are shot at clothing-optional beaches in the Netherlands, the Canary Islands, Miami, the Greek Islands and the Balearic Islands of Ibiza and Mallorca in Spain.  The performative nature of this work positions the artist as both voyeur and participant. The camera becomes the recording device that captures the limits of bodily freedoms. This series was first presented at PS1 in 2007, followed by Osmos in 2013.

Kathe Burkhart (American, born 1958) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Working since the early ‘80s, Burkhart has consistently and candidly engaged gender roles, sexuality, celebrity, and language to, in her words, “articulate a radical female subject.” Ongoing from 1982, her Liz Taylor Series of large-scale, richly saturated paintings combines appropriated portraits of actress Elizabeth Taylor with profane language, shattering both female stereotypes and conventions of representation.

Burkhart has had solo exhibitions at Fri Art, Centre d’art de Fribourg/Kunsthalle Freiburg, Fribourg, Switzerland; MoMA PS1, New York; Participant Inc., New York; and Cultuurcentrum Brugge, Bruges, Belgium, among other venues. Her work has been shown recently in group exhibitions such as The American Dream: American Realism 1945-2017, Kunsthalle Emden, Emden, Germany; Fast Forward, Paintings from the 1980s, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Furious Gaze, Montehermoso Cultural Center, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain; and 1993: NYC Experimental Jet Set Trash & No Star,New Museum, New York. Burkhart participated in the 45th Venice Biennale (1993),and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. She maintains an interdisciplinary practice, having published four books of fiction, in addition to a vast collection of poetry and essays. Burkhart currently lives and works in Amsterdam and New York.