Gina Burdass
Born in 1951, Gina Burdass she divides her time between studios in London and Dorset. For short period in the 1960s she was studio assistant to the Op Art artist Bridget Riley whose demanding and immaculately crafted paintings she worked on. However, although Burdass evokes the same challenging craftsmanship in her painting, unlike Riley, whose work tends to be multiplex, with numerous stripes or shapes repeated in a pattern across the entire surface, Burdass’ work is limited to one or two broad bands of colour or to a small number of coloured rectangles placed on a white ground around the edge of the canvas. The renowned art writer and curator Frances Spalding described her work most aptly when she wrote:
“Gina Burdass’s paintings operate on many levels. Their immediate impact is one of clarity. To step into her white-painted studio or this exhibition, after the surfeit of visual information that clutters our screens and streets, is to experience a sudden release, a stripping down and clarifying of sensation. Her emblematic abstract paintings, in their placement of coloured units, offer a visual dance. Their formal patterns undergo slight shifts of emphasis as the permutations alter or a sudden new colour note arrives. The style is minimalist, not so much in the American manner as in the tradition of Minimalism’s European roots, which look back to Piet Mondrian and the abstract painters associated with the Bauhaus. Selection and restraint are evident in the means used; but spareness and rigour are the conduits for a sudden brimming of emotive tension, as, for instance, when an acid yellow holds all the other colours to account.”
