BeAdvisors Art Department Presents

Offsite: Bosse & Baum x Sid Motion Gallery.

Luke Burton: Associated Leagues I – IV

Bosse & Baum brings together four new paintings titled Associated Leagues I to IV by British artist Luke Burton. The works depict a particular view of Girton College, Cambridgeshire, where Burton has recently held a year-long residency. Girton is situated between two large motorways, which can be perpetually heard as a low atmospheric hum against the relative isolation and verdant gardens that surround the college’s buildings. Burton interprets this ambient sound as inherently environmental and decorative, infusing his representation of the superhighway with a cosmic atmosphere, collapsing vast spatial distances. It is depicted as a set of ambivalent relations: magical and celebratory, formally ordered and yet also elemental, sprawling, toxic and chaotic. Below the horizon line is the tennis court that is seemingly abandoned from play and an apple orchard in full bloom, also suggestive of different ideas of excess and emptiness; connectivity and isolation. Across the four paintings, the horizon theatrically lowers gradually like a screen being pulled down until it completely disappears in the fourth painting leaving only the cosmic superhighway visible. In a time when physical movement is so restricted, the roads express dynamism with their swirls of interlacing expressionistic brush marks, an index of the hands’ movement and touch. In contrast, the tiny cars seem toy-like and static. We see headlights signalling to each other as a binary, on/off interaction, suggesting the digital platforms on which we are now so dependent – stationary, mundane, yet oddly magical light boxes for communication.