Biography

Bobbie Burgers’ large-scale paintings and drawings expand and explode the tradition of floral still-life with vivid, gestural blooms. In the two decades of her practice, her trajectory has moved from images approaching realism to, more recently, abstracted blossoms that double as metaphors for the act of painting, which Burgers compares to the brief, fragile lifespan of a flower: a moment to be grasped “with all its frailty and complexity.” Largely self-taught, Burgers has drawn inspiration from early Dutch still-lifes and the history of Chinese painting, which she investigated in-depth during her travels for a recent exhibition of her work in Beijing. Her paintings have been compared to and exhibited alongside those of Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Jack Shadbolt—artists who, like Burgers, are interested in the relationship between art and nature at the core. Of Burgers’ take on this relationship, Critic Dorota Kozinska has written that her “subject never feels excised from nature, but rather breathed in and exhaled as art.” Burgers lives and works in her hometown of Vancouver, where she received the Vancouver FANS award in 2013 and teaches at the Gordon Smith Foundation. She has exhibited her work at galleries, museums, and art fairs internationally.