Beer With a Painter: Tom Burckhardt
“My favorite phrase lately is ‘mouthfeel,’ which is used in relation to food and drink,” said the East Village artist. “I’m thinking about that textural quality as a parallel to the paintings.”
Tom Burckhardt was named after the Apostle Thomas, who pressed his finger into Jesus’s wound to confirm the resurrection for himself — a fact the artist sees as providential. “It’s no mistake that it’s my name,” he said.
Burckhardt uses skepticism as a creative motivator: to erase our attachment to categorization and break down pretension with humor. In his artistic world, language is slippery, large-scale paintings can also be doodles, and we are encouraged to see faces in abstractions — the phenomenon called pareidolia.
I visited Burckhardt in February in his East Village studio and home, which he shares with his wife, ceramist Kathy Butterly. It’s in an artist loft building on 14th Street that has been home to the likes of Claes Oldenburg and Patty Mucha, Wes Anderson, and Larry Rivers. Burckhardt grew up in New York City with artist parents and a connection to New York School painting and the painter-poet circles, which included Alex Katz, Lois Dodd, and John Ashbery. His work often alludes to these histories, but he is not weighed down by the past — there’s a lightness and pragmatism in his treatment.
Although best known for his abstract paintings, Burckhardt has also created walk-in installations, plein-air paintings in Maine (where he spends his summers), and intimate collage paintings on found book pages. His most recent abstractions exude an otherworldly light, allowing suggestive forms to breed and layer. He uses and manipulates the logic of grids, directional axes, and linearity while combining colors and forms that invoke a range of visual culture: art historical images, banal patterning, and mechanistic animation.
Burckhardt was born in New York City in 1964, received a BFA from the State University of New York (SUNY) College at Purchase, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited at museums including the Bowdoin Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine; the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio; the Weatherspoon Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina; and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine. He has received solo exhibitions at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, George Adams Gallery, and, most recently, High Noon Gallery, all in New York. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
