Biography

Ricky Burnett was born in Birmingham, England, in 1949, and moved to South Africa at the age of six. He attended Wits University, where he studied Medicine before switching to a BA degree in the Humanities. It was after discovering the work of Cezanne that he decided to become an artist: he was struck by the merging of thought and feeling in Cezanne’s work, the capacity to order experience while remaining emotionally connected to the world.

In 1972, he met Bill Ainslie and within a year he was making art objects. Almost simultaneously, he started to teach – and found an aptitude and passion for teaching that remains with him today. His remarkable talent for curating also emerged soon afterwards: he curated two exhibitions for the Foundation, one at Gallery 101 and the second at the Market Theatre Gallery. These were followed by two solo exhibitions of his own work at the Market Theatre Gallery and the Enthoven Gallery. Gail Behrmann described the metal sculptures as ‘extraordinary abstract drawings in space that caught the eye of Anthony Caro’. 

For several years, Burnett would remain associated with the Art Foundation and write reviews for the Rand Daily Mail. A major turn occurred when he started the BMW Tributaries project, which involved collecting artworks throughout southern Africa. Andrew Vester wrote:

‘Ricky Burnett has put together the most exciting collection of South African art ever seen. The show is unique for it brings together works from so many different sources … His journey took him to art schools and teaching studios … to community centre workshops, to museums, to opulent collections, grass woven beehive huts, city centres, barren settlements, and some very pretty villages.’

Following the success of Tributaries, Burnett moved to London in 1985. There he worked on what would eventually become the famous Brenthurst Collection, now on permanent loan at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

In 1989, Burnett returned to South Africa to curate a ground-breaking exhibition of Jackson Hlungwane’s work. The following year, Burnett and Mary Slack set up Newtown Galleries. This gallery was the first in the country to exhibit new work from the rest of continental Africa. Burnett curated around thirty exhibitions during this period.

Ricky Burnett moved to the United States in 2001, near Seattle, where he continued to teach and make art before returning to South Africa in 2007. He soon re-established himself as a teacher and curator – and curated the celebrated ‘Horse’ at the Everard Read (Johannesburg) and CIRCA. A series of ground-breaking exhibitions also followed: ‘Margins’ (Everard Read Johannesburg, 2008), ‘Resurrection Cycles & On Skin’ (smac, 2009), ‘Damascus Gate’ (Gallery 2, 2014), ‘Troubled with Goya’ (Everard Read Johannesburg, 2015) and ‘Goya Adaptations’ (Everard Read, Johannesburg, 2016).

In 2016, Palimpsest Press published a book about Ricky Burnett’s recent work. Titled Troubled with Goya, it features photographs by Liz Whitter and contains Ricky Burnett in conversation with Tracey Hawthorne. The book is available for sale at:
https://www.palimpsestinternational.com/troubled-with-goya

Recent

Exhibitions

  • Exhibited at the Turbine Art Fair

    Ricky Burnett and Stephen Hobbs
    Curated by Koulla Xinisteris

    Tension is needed to break beyond the ephemeral. Whether reaching or collapsing, striving or compromising, accepting or resisting, tension between states is the constant element – the line that holds the dichotomy together. Actively working with physical and metaphysical tensions is a key imperative for artists Ricky Burnett and Stephen Hobbs.

    For Hobbs, it’s about grounding the transient, mutable world in object-centred experiences of the real and present. For Burnett, striving to communicate his inner vision of exaltation is the compelling and confounding challenge that animates his practice. For both artists, meaning follows form.

    Allied by the shared conviction that apparent absence is a means to finding felt presence, both artists employ materials, including plywood, cardboard, paper and various types of tape (materials frequently used in packaging), to pursue their abstract architectures of thought. Precise internal relations established in these works – the variations and direction of touch, the textural allusions of the surfaces, the interplay of glow and recession, and of addition and of subtraction – all embody decisions taken in the making process. These decisions constitute the meaning of the work.

    In Hobbs’s work the rectangle is crenelated by surgically incisive amputations – even so, a phantom rectangle remains. The rectangles in Burnett’s work are precarious in a different way. Echoing the rectangle of the work itself, the rectangles within the body of the work stagger, lean, overlap and isolate. At times, they assert their four- cornered stability, only to relinquish it through the violence of a rip or a tear.

    Hobbs acts out against constrictive, authoritarian boundaries, ripping off tapes of screaming colour from the surfaces of earlier works, made during his stay in the Republic of Ireland from 2019–2021 during the COVID-19 lockdowns. His experience of the pandemic heightened his sense of the disposability of life, reflected in his use of cardboard, with its associations of temporariness, dislocation, boxed-up living, borders and limitations. It also, ironically, freed him from future-gazing, anchoring him in the present, grounding him and returning him to the perennial the structures and architecture of the real. Still, tensions persist, giving rise to fresh shifts…

    Burnett veers upward only to be brought pointedly earthward again – horizontally, vertically, along each and every cardinal angle. You never reach, you never fall. Holding spiritual power at these tension levels becomes a form of practice as prayer. Answers are elusive, but the effort fosters meaning. Cathedral-like, his work resonates with the power of Byzantine icons – still, watchful, silent.

    For both artists, their work is the bridge between two vantage points – the catalyst that compels them to keep moving toward unrealised possibility. The reach emulates the fantasy or the dream; the collapsed structure is the death of that striving. The tension between these forces – reach and collapse – is the eureka space, in which the visual becomes sonic and the artist becomes the vital channel.

  • What happens if you strip away the appearance of what’s often called ‘‘content’’? If you remove that, doyou have anything left? Instead of having a portrait of a person, what happens if you paint the portrait but lose the person? If you take all the words away from a poem, do you still have the poem? Is the core beauty of the poem a freestanding quality? These are questions that have exercised Ricky Burnett for much of the forty-plus years of his career as a painter. And he’s addressed them in his series, ‘Troubled by Goya’, some fifty oil-on-canvas works completed between 2014 and 2015.

Curation

Ricky Burnett has worked extensively as a curator locally and abroad. Important exhibitions include Tributaries, Jackson Hlungwane, Horse, as well as around thirty exhibitions when he ran Newtown Galleries with Mary Slack.

Jackson Hlungwane was first featured in Tributaries, and his solo exhibition with Burnett was a fitting sequel. It established Hlungwane is one of the most significant and exciting South African artists of his generation.

At Newtown Galleries, Burnett was the first curator in the country to bring in art from all over continental Africa, while artists such as Vyakul from India and Basil Beatty from the UK were also included. Memorable exhibitions included Urban Artifacts, an exhibition of Geoffrey Armstrong’s sculptures, as well as work by Kay Hassan, David Koloane and Pat Mautloa for Africus ’95.

Burnett’s exhibition ‘Horse’ at the Everard Read and CIRCA also brought together a collection of contemporary South African artists who were not traditionally associated with one another. It became one of the most memorable exhibitions in the gallery’s history.