Edwin Burdis: AutoLaque

Vitrine hosts a solo exhibition of established British artist Edwin Burdis. For the gallery’s second exhibition in its new Basel space, “AutoLaque” brings together new works in paint with sound and performance in a unique and extravagant fusion, quintessential of Burdis’ practice.

The future, home and the environment (with a large helping of humour) are recurring themes in Burdis’ practice: negotiating the serious through the absurd. Depicting various forms and characters as heterogeneous organs and machines, he draws from his homeland island Britain, its inhabitants and an imaginary world full of absurdity, recklessness and delusions of grandeur. Burdis’ works depict this Britain through various themes – housing, health, water and food production – and in this new body of work he questions our ongoing relationship with cars and their supposed status as a symbol of choice and freedom. As an auto-repair company might replace, layer and ‘pimp’ these objects of desire, Burdis creates his forms with a bold mix of acrylic, gloss, spray paint and car body filler on wood panels and three-dimensional forms. This new body of work sits within a recent series of works described loosely as ‘Magpie Operas’, in which live and pre-recorded sound is presented within two- and three-dimensional painted installations. The script and recordings have evolved concurrently to the painted works with the opera acting as a link between the striking and surreal imagery and his rich sound vocabulary.