Tim Burns: the abstract intuition

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Tim Burns is a notable figure in contemporary Tasmanian painting. Living and working at Cloudy Bay on Bruny Island, his scapes are of a less familiar kind than perhaps one would expect. Cannily referent far beyond his picturesque surrounds, Burns’s works capture more than the geographic and the built, the physical or the cultural, more even than the transitioning weather, capturing instead something like transition itself.

Of surprising scale and variation, Burns’s abstract works drift impossibly between Expressionist joy and Japanese minimalism. Texture, depth and detail shift subtly beneath simple, organic lines and forms. At times they are map-like, at others almost hieroglyphic; there is something ancient in the pictographic markings. The eye traces, rests and returns lyrically, boldly and peacefully.

Burns' works are held in numerous museum collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.  Burns is a winner of the Hobart Art Prize, 1994 and Fleurieu Biennale Art Prize in 2008.

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