Georgia native, London trained artist Teo Burki is known for exploring the difference between the visual language of the digital and the manual. AKA blurring the lines between the url and irl. For her artistic practice, it was done by contextualizing found or readymade materials, or easily accessible items and collaging them accordingly. Especially during the lockdown, the paradox of abstraction comes into play, as her time was spent in an enclosed domain with the piled up visual diaries. Accents of eccentric doodlings with the ‘heap of broken images' of the screen and the digital virtual reality, made her think about ‘hybrid images’ - an image that combines multiple layers of physician and digital.
Born before the collapse of the Soviet Union, she never thought that she would be an artist growing up. Her interest spans the fields of painting, drawing, and video art, Teo works in different disciplines. By not only fusing abstraction, expressiveness and the figurative but also by interplaying the virtual and real life, she creates a new space for the ‘in-between.’ Altogether, he has created a very distinctive artistic language of mixing dynamic lines and forms, everyday pop imagery, collage elements reminiscent of MS Paint and historical abstract expressionism.
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The artworks from the series ‘Postcards from Isolation’ were done during the lockdown, transforming the found photographic prints with the over-layered graphic drawings, with markers, pencils and crayons, articulating strong gestural brushstrokes and marks, maintaining the eccentric nervousness of limitations and the sentiments of isolation. Merging the different pictorial representation, it is finally composed as hybrid visual and reversed back to the printing process for entanglement of different simulacrums. Its energy and fragmentation, her work powerfully captures the spirit of our rapidly changing world and the fractured way we experience it.
SOLD
2020
Monoprint signed by the artist made with the top-of-the-line fine art technique of giclée print on the highest-grade fine art paper to ensure long-lasting quality.
30 x 42cm
Includes Certificate of Authenticity
Teo is another artist who in her artworks out ways to deal with the infiltration of tech into our lives. She does so by depicting a space where the digital and manual come together. Talking about art historical movements that are taking shape today is a hard thing to do, but there are widespread themes artists are devoting themselves to. In one form or another, artists, especially contemporary ones, are always reflecting their time. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that artists today are increasingly focussing on the friction between the virtual and the real.
But Teo’s work is also in other ways in dialogue with art history. Looking at her poignant work from an art historical lens, like other artists, she seems to have similarly turned to abstraction as a means to express personal feelings and emotions. Historically speaking, abstract art’s divorce from confining realistic modes of representation meant that artists had more space to explore subjective and emotional states of mind. More space for imagination.
Around the 1950s, abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko embraced abstract ways of painting to show subjectivities and emotions to celebrate the artistic genius. Which was emblematic of glorifying American individualism at the time. Teo’s work is abstract in a way that explores subjectivities but also speaks to larger changes in society. Her works are more about collective experiences of technologies and look for the in-betweenness with real life.
SOLD
2020
Monoprint signed by the artist made with the top-of-the-line fine art technique of giclée print on the highest-grade fine art paper to ensure long-lasting quality.
30 x 42cm
Includes Certificate of Authenticity
Teo has exhibited at, amongst others, the Tate and Apiary Studios in London. She holds a Master of Fine Arts Degree from Central Saint Martins.
SOLD
2020
Monoprint signed by the artist made with the top-of-the-line fine art technique of giclée print on the highest-grade fine art paper to ensure long-lasting quality.
30 x 42cm
Includes Certificate of Authenticity
Follow Teo on her instagram.
Artwork photographs courtesy of the artist. Portraits taken by Alina zum Hebel (website/ instagram). Photography courtesy of where’s the frame? and Alina zum Hebel.
where’s the frame? - ‘Lick the Future’ is a collection of London vanguards comprising of 6 artists that are making waves. The collection will be available from December 2020 until the end of January 2021.
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