Collections Detail – MAC Montréal

Artist: Anthony Burnham
Title: Maquette of Wall and Floor
Dimensions and medium: Oil on canvas, 152.5 × 184 cm
Artwork description: At first glance, Anthony Burnham’s Maquette of Wall and Floor looks exactly as its title describes: a neutral-coloured maquette made of soft, folded material, that recreates a kind of contact area between the wall and the floor. The title also references the painting’s location on the floor, near a wall. Seemingly banal elements that usually slip our attention (the detail of an architectural element, a plain bedsheet, a houseplant, etc.) are among the artist’s preferred subjects. Burnham has developed a protean practice that often involves the construction of sculptures, which he then documents through various means as a way to translate how these are seen in the studio. Maquette of Wall and Floor is a fine example of how the artist questions the very nature of reproduction and its relationship to our perception of the real. The work’s meaning is constructed according to the self-referentiality of the subject. Its meticulous, hyperreal rendering grounds our reflection on the conditions under which images are constructed, much like the historical and conceptual links between painting and reality.

Anthony Burnham