Victor Burgin

Over the past forty years, Victor Burgin’s work has established him as both a highly influential artist and a renowned theorist of the still and moving image. Burgin first came to prominence in the late 1960s as one of the originators of Conceptual Art. In the 1970s his work consisted mainly of large framed photographic sequences, involving printed texts either juxtaposed with or superimposed on the image. At the beginning of the 1990s he turned towards digital video, but video from the point-of-view of photography – for example, Burgin is particularly interested in the relation between stasis and movement.

In formal terms, Burgin’s works explore relations between still and moving photographic images and words, most often in their narrative functions, the artist thus reflects on related representational codes. Although his works are rooted in everyday reality, Burgin’s main and most constant concern is the psychological space where perceptions of the physical world merge with memory and fantasy.