Kathe Burkhart | Bloom & Doom

Kathe Burkhart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based between New York City and Amsterdam. Working since the early 1980s, Burkhart has consistently and frankly engaged gender roles, sexuality, celebrity, and language in an interdisciplinary practice that encompasses painting, film, photography, installation, and writing. 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. 

Since 1982, Burkhart has been working on the ongoing conceptual project The Liz Taylor Series. Drawing on depictions of actress Elizabeth Taylor from film stills, publicity portraits, tabloid shots, and other visual sources, the works in the series merge provocative imagery and text to critique patriarchal, die-hard systems of (bio)power. For Burkhart, Taylor is a central motif through which to explore intersections of fame, gender, sexuality, and identity, both on societal and autobiographical planes. 

Through vibrant, mixed-media works that combine portraiture with bold colour and graphic patterns, Burkhart reimagines Liz Taylor as both an object of desire and a symbol of power, challenging the commodification of women and gender-nonconforming people, and channeling outrage in a forthright and caustic way. Words play a key role in Burkhart’s work. Most often in English and Dutch, Burkhart inserts swear words, insults, and other coarse and harsh names, creating headlines that, in combination with her characters, imitate the sensationalism found in gossip magazines, in which women’s lives have historically been reprimanded and exploited.

Since the beginning of her artistic practice Burkhart foregrounds concerns about representation through a feminist lens—specifically, the tendency to view women through a lens of victimhood or as passive objects of male desire. By taking Taylor’s image and constantly recontextualizing it, Burkhart asserts her control over the image and its meaning, giving her an agency that challenges the original portrayal of Taylor as a passive, tragic figure. Resisting both victimology and essentialism, Burkhart deconstructs the language of curses and appropriated media images by exploding female stereotypes, representing a dominant female subjectivity.