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Victor Burgin

The first works of Victor Burgin (b. 1941, Sheffield, United Kingdom), created in the 1960s, are marked by their conceptual anchoring and a refusal of paint. He has no hesitation in describing them, fairly provocatively, as an “anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud”. His photograph works and videos are notably interested in the relationships between text and image. The representation of women in society is also a recurring theme in his works. Winner, in 1986, of the Turner Prize, it was in this same year that Burgin created the series entitled Office at night, composed of seven photo- graphs. The starting point for this series is a picture painted in 1940 by the American artist Ed- ward Hopper, from which Burgin borrowed the title and certain details, visible in the photograph. Showing a boss and his secretary in an office interior, the scene painted by Hopper represents, according to Burgin, a “mise-en-scène of the conflict of ‘Desire’ and the ‘Law’”, in other words, latent eroticism in the patriarchal relationship of the superior and his subordinate. Burgin asso- ciates the different photographic interpretations of the Hopper painting with allusive pictograms and monochrome fields making reference to “official colours of the international system of sig- nals”. Here, in particular, he strove “to transform the role of the woman from object of curiosity to subject of curiosity – to transform showing into knowing, exhibitionism into epistemophilia”. By disrupting the representation of the active woman, he adapts her to his era.

Artworks

  1. Victor Burgin, "Office at Night", 1985-1986. Tirage gélatino-argentique et film plastique stratifié sur panneau. 185 x 244 cm. Collection M.J.S., Paris. Dépôt 2006 – Collection Mudam Luxembourg © Photo : Galerie Durand-Dessert, Paris
    Victor Burgin Office at Night, 1985–1986

    Tirage gélatino-argentique et film plastique stratifié sur panneau
    185 x 244 cm
    Collection M.J.S., Paris
    Dépôt 2006 – Collection Mudam Luxembourg
    © Photo : Galerie Durand-Dessert, Paris

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