“Limits” is a relative term. Like beauty, it is often in the eye of the beholder.
—Chris Burden
Gagosian Paris is pleased to present works by Chris Burden, in his first exhibition in Paris in more than twenty years.
Since the 1970s, Burden has channeled the daring spirit of his early life-threatening performances into sculptures that embody technical feats on an imposing scale. Toys (figurines, train sets, Erector parts) are used as the building blocks for expansive scale models, cities, and battlefields, while actual vehicles (ships, trucks, and cars) are suspended or set in motion in surreal and improbable ways.
Since 2003 Burden has constructed large-scale models of bridges—both real and imagined—by plotting thousands of toy construction parts. Tower of London Bridge (2003) mimics every aspect of the suspension design of the actual bridge, including its functional drawbridge. Tyne Bridge Kit (2004) is Burden’s reimagining of the Erector toolbox: the one-ton wooden chest contains rows of drawers that store the tools, blueprints, and two hundred thousand metal parts that can theoretically be used to assemble a 9 1/2-meter-long model of the Tyne Bridge in England. In Three Arch Dry Stack Bridge, 1/4 Scale (2013), first exhibited in the major survey Chris Burden: Extreme Measures at the New Museum, New York (2013–14), three elegant arches are made up of hand-cast concrete blocks, held together by gravity alone in the manner of classical keystone construction.
In Porsche with Meteorite (2013), Burden presents the convulsive image of a bright yellow sports car hanging in apparent balance with an extraterrestrial rock at either tip of a huge steel truss. Pair of Namur Mortars (2013) is a more subtle mimesis, the seventeenth-century war machine reproduced to functional perfection, including piles of stone cannonballs. Manipulating perception through obsessive veracity combined with shifting scale to achieve effects that are as ominous as they are surreal, Burden continues to challenge the physical and psychological limits of sculpture.
