Barbara Seiler

Barbara Seiler Gallery is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition of new works by Ralph Bürgin (*1980, Basel CH), titled watching a peaceful river. In his work Ralph Bürgin brings human bodies and body parts onto canvases while playing with proportion, scale and space. In this process he dismisses a human body’s natural proportions and instead focusses on filling out the space limited by the borders of the canvas. The works for watching a peaceful river have been painted in solitude, whilst in insolation during the past months. Ralph Bürgin was working on several paintings simultaneously over the course of weeks, while constantly layering and brushing off colour, which adds to the transparency of the seemingly fully painted canvases. The influence of the solitude is clearly noticeable in his works when compared earlier paintings he made. The paintings for this exhibition may depict Ralph Bürgin’s typical canvas filling bodies and body parts, however, instead of seeming entirely figurative and taken out of context he started playing with backgrounds and the dissolving of the connected body. Ralph Bürgin considers the importance of the head in his full body paintings as secondary, which is made evident by the proportions he chooses in which he creates a shift of focus. Nevertheless, the exhibition includes portraits, which almost act as a zoom in relation to the full body paintings. In the portraits the large heads contrast the smaller and precise execution of the facial features which gives the viewer insight into what the small heads of the full body paintings might look like. This aspect once again underlines the artist’s choice to create a shift of focus in his work Bürgin has studied in Zurich and Basel and received his Master in fine arts at Institut Kunst Basel. He currently resides in Basel and works in his studio in France (Alsace). Recent solo exhibitions include Centre culturel Suisse in Paris (2019). Furthermore, he was chosen to join the Zurich initiative Gasträume, which aims to exhibit art in public spaces around the city. From 27 June to 20 September his large scale work les hommes assis is exhibited on Sigi-Feigel-Terasse.