Susanne Burchia

Susanne Burchia – CROSSING LINES

The relationship between things in the world, including herself, and the perception of subject matter has always fascinated Susanne Burchia. An important part of the artist’s work is philosophical and scientific research.

Burchia gets inspired by different topics and transfers these inspirations into the artworks and tries to express her perception thoughts and feelings. Although the techniques and approaches are very different in the various cycles and series we show at the carte blanche #4 exhibition crossing lines, there is a common thread that runs through Burchia´s work. The alienation and the way we perceive certain things, objects and situations.

Another feature that runs through her work is the play with the contrast between precision and chance. Early works show the impact of different forms and the representation of everyday objects (Angoli liberi series), using them with the aim of creating an alienating effect (first used in art by Marcel Duchamp).

In Burchia´s later major series, Urban Space, the artist examines how atmospheres that surround us every day are perceived, where they origin from and how they affect us. She was majorly inspired by German philosopher Gernot Böhme and his work on atmosphere.

Through various artistic forms of representation the artist wants to capture environments, atmospheres, objects and left spaces, sounds, traces and memories. The works reflect man’s dependence on nature and the environment, and the fact that man is losing connection with the environment at an increasing rate. Burchia conducted for this series of works an interview with the well known Austrian sound artist Sam Auinger who works on „hearing perspective“. In her only recently finished works Entgrenzung series, with turpentine, Susanne Burchia focuses more on the technique itself. Turpentine is actually an agent used to clean brushes or erase paint. She finds it particularly interesting to use this medium for painting because it brings a certain transparency which the artist likes. One takes an uncoated canvas and mixes oil paints with a lot of turpentine and pours them onto the canvas, creating spontaneous different colors to overlap, resulting in layers of lucidity.

In the works of the Entgrenzung series, Burchia tries to find ways through minimal variation of form or position, that aim to change the underlying system through a deviation of pattern. In the Entgrenzung series, the artist reflects on the totality of completeness to the totality of incompleteness.

For the artist borders always have something of a totalitarian character. Something total, something that delimits or something that ends. She finds it particularly interesting to allow these boundaries, whether metaphorical or real, to flow into one another, blurring them more and more to the point where all boundaries seem to have disappeared.

The artist tries to find ways to break the underlying system and thereby changes it by minimally varying the form or position. This corresponds to the approach in painting as well as in installation.

The obliteration has something attractive and a great aesthetic appeal. It is the disclosure of a conflict, a disagreement, a violence, one could also say a protest. It can be a withdrawal, a censorship, an evaporating and obscuring effect.

Burchia made the chair sculpture and the video free of gravity, at the same time as the angoli liberi series during the 2020 quarantine. It is about letting everyday objects appear in a new light (alienation effect). Familiar objects whose meaning have changed and thus questions their use. The dimensions of time and space, the domestic and private in the face of isolation. The slowness that comes from an unexpected quarantine, that everything and everyone slows down and changes a lot. In the video free of gravity, in which the stone appears almost weightless and is hypnotic, you can hear the sounds of the planets making the sounds as they rotate in the background (by NASA).

Burchias work Das weibliche Gehör , glazed ceramic, consists of the imprint of a woman’s private parts, which has been replaced by an ear, and thus aims to draw attention to the woman’s sensibility.

In the future the artists would like to go beyond the two-dimensional with the topic of “delimitation” and would like to work on installations in three-dimensional spaces.

This space is dedicated to showcasing contemporary artistic perspectives, offering both local and international artists the opportunity to exhibit their work through a hybrid format: an online virtual gallery alongside a physical exhibition space located within Aurora.