"While I paint, I am suspended between sweetness and sorrow.  Suspended between worlds: youth and ageing, wild freedom and sage wisdom, winter and spring. The ecstatic tension that makes you feel something deeper, something hidden in the brushstrokes, like a certain yearning, seeing the artists hand searching.  There is the obvious sweetness that flowers suggest, but there is also a sadness to them, fading, turning to dust, a sort of mournful quality.  It’s their own brief life that makes them all the more sweet while around.  They perform beautifully, perfumed and coloured, but one must be in the moment to enjoy.  And to paint, one has to be in the moment, grasping that moment, and trying to capture that moment with all it frailty and complexity.


People always ask, why flowers?  They are a base, a starting point, a colour, a season, something for me to cling to when facing the void.  From here I reduce them to their bare essentials, to lay bare the emotions, not the realism.  It is a modern mix of contradictory emotions, mixing my past with my future.  I love the subject matter, but what I love more is the feeling they give me.  All the parts, but not so necessarily the whole. Walking backwards into the future, not really wanting to let go of the things that inspire me, I am still learning from them.  I am dragging the branches along, picking up the petals and tossing them in my bag of tricks to be scattered as loose references in new works as need be.”  

Bobbie Burgers  2014




In these works Bobbie Burgers references Jo Freeman’s theory “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” relating to the havoc dismissed leadership can unleash in a society lacking a formal framework or pilotage. This is a difficult theory to commit to which takes an intriguing expression in Burgers simultaneous repulsion and attraction to structure. In this contradiction, she whispers freedom, while honouring her original inspiration. By acknowledging the painterly influences from art history instead of pretending independence, Burgers is able to create paintings that are astonishingly new in the highly symbolic tradition of floral paintings. She places the viewer in a moment of pleasure so pure that it makes ones heart still. Her new works, presented in her second solo-exhibition at CoutureGalleri in Spring 2014, tell stories. Or rather, they collect The Stories That We Tell. We pick up bits and pieces of information, of emotion and carry them on and transform them into part of our being. They remind us of both joy and doubt, wishful thinking and careful distancing, of the chance and randomness that gives life its infinite beauty.