Gerardo Burmester

Gerardo Burmester (Porto, 1953). Lives and works in Porto. Attended the Fine Arts School of Porto from 1973 to 1974, the year in which he began exhibiting his work, presenting several pieces of performance art and developing a pictorial body of work that combines neo-romantic references with an ironic criticism of the condition of painting and its subjects in the Portuguese and international scene of the time. Nowadays, Burmester’s work is acknowledged as one of the most important in the context of contemporary Portuguese art, within the generation of artists who rose to notoriety during the 1980s, besides being one of the most important conceptual artists of the 1970s, and the author of installation pieces of evident aesthetic and experimental originality. Besides being a member of Grupo Puzzle, in 1982 he also founded and directed Espaço Lusitano (Porto), alongside Albuquerque Mendes. During the late 1980s, Burmester’s work began making use of objects and spatial installations as parts of a theatre of reinvented places, drawing viewers close and then pushing them away in a series of visual seduction games that are both attractive and cold in the untouchable perfectionism of the materials used: wood veneer, polished aluminium, industrial felt. Currently, the artist presents a set of coloured elements of polished aluminium whose volumes punctuate the space, in an itinerary that now reflects the viewer’s image, now highlights the viewer’s exteriority in relation to their alignment in space. Pieces of considerable size feature a new element of research: acrylic sheets and their potential “transparencies”.