The content of Kathe Burkhart's work deals with the visual and verbal articulation of the radical female subject, through the juxtaposition of fiction and nonfiction, text and image, power and powerlessness.
Kathe Burkhart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York City and Amsterdam. Working since the early 1980s, Kathe Burkhart has consistently and frankly engaged gender roles, sexuality, celebrity, and language in an interdisciplinary practice.
In her practice, Burkhart utilizes an intermedia orientation, working in multiple, extended series that are thematically linked through the tropes of performativity and portraiture, Self and Others. The feminist content drives the form, addressing the interstice of the personal and political using a self-analytic mechanism to employ autobiographical references. The content of her work deals with the visual and verbal articulation of the radical female subject, through the juxtaposition of fiction and nonfiction, text and image, power and powerlessness. Much of the work is photo-based, relying on appropriated photographic source materials that Burkhart researches and collects. She employs a wide range of media such as painting, drawing, collage, photography video, installation, digital media, fiction, nonfiction, poetry and the occasional sculpture. Writing is combined with performance, painting with text, poetry with installation; video with a conflation between documentary, tableaux, and autobiography. Related issues tie together an oeuvre that utilizes different media, yet maintains a consistent content.
Her Liz Taylor Series uses Pop Art imagery and assemblage to critique representation and the sexual politics of identity. It spawned the term ‘Bad Girl’ in contemporary art, which was derived from the byline of a 1990 Flash Art cover story devoted to the artist's work. This extended series of large-scale, photo-based paintings has been ongoing for 43 years, since 1982. It is a feminist project that is both intersubjective and a social critique. The work blurs portraiture with self-portraiture and public with private; disrupting traditional representational painting through its combination of pop stylization, image and text, autobiographically performative process, and use of collage. Resisting both victimology and essentialism, it deconstructs the language of curses and appropriated media images by exploding female stereotypes, representing a dominant female subjectivity.
Other notorious series of works include The Chocolate and Puzzle Haikus, which integrate poetry into her visual practice. Chocolate Haikus are giant wall works consisting of haikus written by Burkhart. Six inch Dutch chocolate letters are utilized to construct large-scale wall poems that are flanked by a velvety carpet of 15 kilos of chocolate sprinkles. On the other hand, Puzzle Haikus are floor works constructed with children’s puzzle mats, a type of educational toy, to form poems that interrogate the violent nature of everyday life.
Kathe Burkhart has widely exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Whitney Museum, the Venice Biennale, PS1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam Museum, SMAK Museum, Kunsthalle Fribourg, the New Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, and the Chicago Art Institute, among others. She has had solo exhibitions with Cheim and Read Gallery, Mary Boone Gallery, and Participant Inc among others. She received a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant in 2022, a Mondriaan Fonds grant in 2021 and 2020, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. Her work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institue of Chicago, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the SMAK Museum, Ghent, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Amsterdam Museum, among others.
She is the author of four books of fiction, Dudes, 2014, Participant Press, NYC; Between the Lines, Hachette, Litteratures, January 2006; Deux Poids, Deux Mesures (The Double Standard) Participant Press 2005 and Hachette Litteratures, Paris, 2002, and From Under the 8 Ball, (LINE, 1985). She has been anthologized in Writers Who Love Too Much (NY: Nightboat Press, 2017) Love, Always (Oakland: Transgress Press, 2015) and has also been published in Artforum, Hyperallergic.com, Evergreen Review, Esopus, Women and Performance, Cultural Politics, Purple Fiction, FlashArt, and High Performance, among others. Regency Arts Press published a monograph of her paintings, The Liz Taylor Series: The First Twenty Five Years in 2007. Her papers were acquired by the Fales Collection of NYU’s Bobst Library in 2015. This acquisition was accompanied by a solo exhibition and installation in 2023.