Bobbie Burgers: The Hard Work of Spring

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Bobbie Burgers, "Hybernation #8," 2020/2021

mixed media detail, Photo: Rachel Topham, 2021.

The West Vancouver Art Museum is pleased to present this exhibition featuring new work by Bobbie Burgers, including two new series of works on paper and two free-standing sculptures. Forced to create on a smaller scale and in a more contained way during the initial COVID-19 lockdown, Burgers turned to paper and less paint to continue her practice at home. On her return to her studio, she continued to work with paper far more frequently, not just as a substrate, but in her collage and sculpture too. 

These new works on paper and sculptures highlight the relationship between delicacy and mass, creating a sense of tension. Burgers’ recent woodblock prints, also included in this exhibition, offer a culmination in these material experiments. While they appear to be sketch-like in their form, they are, in fact, incredibly precisely rendered.

Over time, since her early work in the mid-1990s, Burgers’ subjects have largely focused on flowers. Drawing inspiration from her own garden, her early still-life work evolved into an ever-more abstract exploration of flowers that she captured in various stages of life—from fresh to petal-less. The works exhibited here are so abstracted as to be unrecognizable as florals. Not only has the experience of the last 18 months permitted her an opportunity to explore new media, it has also precipitated the ultimate departure in the form of her subjects.

The “Hard Work of Spring” is a poetic phrase that is often employed to describe the process an animal undergoes when emerging from hibernation. For an artist so accustomed to capturing nature in all of its stages, it seems a fitting way to characterize her recent work and experience as an artist. The works exhibited here display an emergence from hibernation, from the constrictions of materials, and from representational forms.

About the artist

Bobbie Burgers is a West Vancouver-based painter whose work intimately examines the natural processes of decay, transformation, and metamorphosis. While florals have always been her primary source of inspiration, her unique understanding of their physical composition and metaphorical connotations has allowed her to push the classical subject to near abstraction. In addition to canvas, Burgers' expressive mark-making and textural surfaces extend to collage and sculpture. Burgers has exhibited her work internationally including in Sweden and China. She is represented in Toronto, Vancouver, and San Francisco.