Burt Barr

In Sextet, New York artist Burt Barr (1938, Lewinston – 2016, Sag Harbor) has assembled three pieces created between 1998 and 2001. Displayed in vertical diptyches, Angel, Rain Piece and August reveal three couples engaged in the game of erotic encounters: the pas de deux of attraction, desire and fulfilment, in which the actions of the protagonists – and the spectator’s observation thereof – appear suspended in an ambiguous tension. Barr, who with August recalls the famous kiss shared by Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity (1953), develops his narrative vignettes from a slowed-down cinematographic rhythm, accentuated by the slow movements witnessed on the accompanying screens.