EDWIN BURDIS AT MAX WIGRAM GALLERY

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The celebrated musician and performance artist, Edwin Burdis, has completed a series of works for his solo show which opens at MWG on 6th September. The exhibition will represent a real development, in the relationship between sound, image and moment  for his work. An elaborate  and extensive series of painted works, made up of exuberant full black outline against flat colour ground, which describe extended, accentuated figures and heightened symbolic elements, with a intense illustrational, turn of the last century feel about them, will hang and lean against the walls of the gallery in the manner of a complete tableaux or situation.

Burdis arrives at the performative element of his exhibition in a particularly circular manner. The poet Heather Phillipson has been invited to respond to the illusory, Beardslyesque characters, places and situations in the painted works , her resulting text has in turn been set to music composed by the artist. So, in this way, Burdis is reclaiming an interpretation of his own work with a sort of Chinese whisper of associative creativity. The music, which will be available during the exhibition in the form of a vinyl record or telephone download, is there to exist alongside the narrative of the moment.

The relationship, in Burdis’s work, between sound and image is fascinating, with sound in the act of performance carrying a different sense to that in recorded music. The fact that Burdis started and continues to perform as a singer in a band, is part of his relation to drawing and, now, painting. The elements in the drawn work are characters, to be animated, as in an Opera, by sound.

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