Continuing through November 4, 2014
Santa Fe's art world is quite fortunate to see the return of the work of Paul Burlin, a late modernist and Abstract Expressionist who made the pilgrimage to the southwest and Santa Fe more than one hundred years ago. "Absolute Conviction" is a mixed survey of abstract and figurative work, mostly from his later years in New York as a major tenant of Abstract Expressionism. The work ranges from the artist's mixed media collage from the mid-1920s, made when Burlin lived as an expatriate in Paris and Europe, to the late sixties painterly abstractions done shortly before his death.
Subject matter evolves from early landscape and figurative work, to the artist's absorption of cubist sensibilities, and finally to his psychedelic take on Abstract Expressionism, in which Burlin painted gestural curves in stunningly chaotic color schemes. As the youngest artist to be shown in the 1913 Armory show, Burlin established a place in art history early on, yet this show illustrates his unrelenting passion for aesthetic experimentation and elaboration.
