FEET ON THE GROUND​

solo show by Helen Bur

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23.04.22 - 14.05.22

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

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Rooted in the recent mural works by artist Helen Bur, Feet On The Ground reviews a large part of the visual rhetoric constructed through the artists’ travels and encounters. After almost 10 years of muralist practice, Helen Bur's second solo exhibition at La Causa Galería revisits a selection of walls painted in Sweden, Italy, Spain, France, Kosovo and Scotland, as well as unseen ideas and proposed sketches.

Revisiting a series of images previously presented in giant format, Feet On The Ground returns them to the intimacy of the canvas. Fascinated by the power that the image possesses, the artist focuses on the influence of the context on the viewer's reading of the image and how this may change when the idea becomes ‘displaced’.

"I have always been intrigued by the dialogue that emerges between the canvas and the wall painting, and how the change in environment or medium often pertains to a change in language". Helen Bur's reflection considers how the image becomes independent, functions on its own, opening up site-specific channels of communication and ultimately escaping the communicative control of its creator.  

Helen Bur's successive works share the desire to embrace universal ideas and concerns such as childhood, femininity and motherhood, collective and individual protest and social inequality, through a personal and poetic approach. The ideas captured in the murals are often specific to the places in which they were created; what changes occur when they are transferred to the canvas? And in this sense, to what extent are the images interchangeable between public and private space?

The exhibition also includes a series of paintings created directly from the printed reference images that contain splashes of the paints that were put on the walls. Images with traces and spills of paint become artifacts of the process of creating the mural. Recreating them on canvas questions the marks that are made when painting and what is artificial versus what is accidental, what we control and what we do not. Again, Helen Bur draws attention to how images manage to communicate despite the will of their maker. 

Finally, painting walls often entails long periods of travel between multiple projects; ideas are formed, created and left behind, often within a period of one or two weeks. This review of the work done offers the artist the opportunity to re-examine and reconsider ideas with a wider perspective, a mediated approach and with both feet on the ground.

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