INFERNO

Victor Burgin (Sheffield, England, 1941), whose first solo show in Italy was in the spaces of Galleria Lia Rumma in Naples in 1972, is now showing a new creation, « The Ideal City », and two historical works, « Hôtel Latône » (1982) and « Solito Posto » (2008).

An artist and the author of seminal essays on photography and on the theory of art, since the late sixties Burgin has been developing his artistic research, constantly moving between practice and theoretical reflections. This “third space” (H. Bhabha, 1991), which is the place and outcome of this alternation, has become the deliberately ambiguous, ever-shifting foundation of his work. On each occasion it may appear in the pages of a book or in a gallery space, and it is much more than a simple act of perception by the viewer.

From this perspective, his preferred medium, photography, has acquired various meanings: it has powerfully corroded modernist autonomy, and has also made it possible to recreate a link with the real world and to abandon the analytical logic of many conceptual practices.

But whether as a form of appropriation or the hijacking of advertising images in his early works, or even the representation of sexual roles in the history of art and in the media, Burgin’s work has also been influenced by his studies of semiotics, cinema and psychoanalysis. He has investigated and decoded “the agency of the image” in defining the predominant terms of representation.

More recently, Burgin has directed his verbal-visual discourse towards architecture and the space of the psyche, which is to say the power and impact of architecture in shaping the world and our unconscious imagination.