Filigree Endings

Bosse and Baum are pleased to present Filigree Endings, a solo exhibition of new work by Luke Burton. His practice works across different media, including sculpture, collage, drawing, and video, which are brought together for this project. Filigree Endings examines the status and relevance of the decorative in contemporary art and society.

Luke Burton refers to the ‘decorative turn’ in contemporary art and visual culture; he is interested in “the murky relationship between modernist abstraction and the decorative, and how we might consider it’s relationship to more classical, received and the more traditional languages of the decorative.”

The exhibition will include a new body of work that develops the artist's interest in how the decorative can be expressed through direct and subtle ways. Sculptures made from brass discs, clear acrylic bowls, floral fabric and tissue paper, described by the artist as 'hanging baskets', produce an interplay between modernist abstraction, domesticated craft and classical ornament. The artist’s work regularly pokes and probes at high and low visual languages and attitudes. Using the warm-glow and jewel-like characteristics of precious metals like bronze, he lures you towards abstract experiences of intensity; the emotional and cognitive, and their ebb and flow in relation to an artwork.

In Burton's recent videos he uses the architecture of urban landscape as a stage to perform estranged or intimate interactions with architectural flourish. He performs a series of repeated gestures to explore Romantic artist positions, humour, and play as a form of dissidence. These actions are elicited rather than predetermined, through paying attention to particular sites and their details, formal qualities and contexts. His work joins certain dots between taste, class, and our subjective experiences of the urban environment without making a picture that is too known, or too heavy.

Luke Burton lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include Tenderpixel's Tenderflix, ICA, London; I see I don't see, co-curated with Jack Tan, Lewisham Art House, London; Athens Video Art Festival, Technopolis Musuem, Athens (all 2014); The Uneventful Day, Carroll/Fletcher, London, A Dense Glitter of Alternatives, Vitrine, London and Love/Architecture, Turner Contemporary, Margate (all 2013). Luke Burton will also have a solo exhibition as the culmination of his year-long residency at Lewisham Art House in May 2015.