News / Chris Burden

On View

For What It’s Worth
Value Systems in Art since 1960

Through June 29, 2024
The Warehouse, Dallas
thewarehousedallas.org

Looking at global, conceptual art tendencies since 1960, For What It’s Worth focuses on artists who generate, question, and infect value systems through their work. These systems might address exchange, social structures, or philosophical intangibles, and many of the selected works share an exploration of the codification of values through language and patterns of behavior. Work by Chris Burden and Sterling Ruby is included.

On View

Chris Burden in
Masterful Attention Seekers

Through July 7, 2024
Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan, South Korea
www.busan.go.kr

Masterful Attention Seekers explores various ways of acquiring and maintaining attention in today’s society from the perspective of contemporary art. The exhibition examines the pursuit of attention not only as an individual concern, but also as a fundamental aspect of society. Work by Chris Burden is included.

On View

Color Is the First Revelation of the World

Through August 18, 2024
Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California
ocma.art

Drawing inspiration from the color theories of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980), this exhibition explores the intersections of color and form, emphasizing the transformative nature of art. Through a collection of monochromatic works in hues of blue, the works on view span the various histories of the twentieth century to pose timely questions about the world around us. Work by Chris Burden, Cy Twombly, and Mary Weatherford is included.

Closed

13 Women

October 8, 2022–August 27, 2023
Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California
ocma.art

13 Women marks the Orange County Museum of Art’s sixtieth anniversary; by paying homage to the thirteen women who founded the Balboa Pavilion Gallery, the OCMA’s predecessor institution, which was opened in 1962. The exhibition presents work from the 1960s to the present by the artists central to the museum’s collection, including Chris Burden and Ed Ruscha.

Closed

Together in Time
Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection

March 26–August 20, 2023
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
hammer.ucla.edu

Presented in conjunction with the unveiling of the Hammer’s building expansion, Together in Time highlights acquisitions made since 2005—the year the institution began collecting contemporary art. Organized around a sequence of discrete installations that highlight varied groupings of artists, the exhibition presents the tendencies and sensibilities at the forefront of contemporary art by Los Angeles–based and international artists. Work by Amoako Boafo, Chris Burden, and Jonas Wood is included.

Closed

Chris Burden in
Enter the Mirror

September 10, 2022–July 23, 2023
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
visit.mcachicago.org

Enter the Mirror calls on the viewer to acknowledge truths that are difficult or unpleasant to see. In artworks from the late 1970s to the mid-2010s, twenty artists grapple with violence, trauma, corruption, historical distortion, and the abuse of power to confront facts and complicity that have shaped our world. This exhibition includes photography, painting, sculpture, video, and installations. Work by Chris Burden is included.

Closed

Escala: Escultura (1945–2000)

March 31–July 2, 2023
Fundación Juan March, Madrid
www.march.es

This exhibition, whose title translates to Scale: Sculpture, begins with a reflection on the effects of the Second World War on a number of artists and their conception of sculptural space as refuge. The role of scale in sculpture is examined, and in an echo of the expanded meaning of sculpture today, the exhibition extends beyond the gallery walls, into the gardens and the surrounding streets. Work by Chris Burden, Alberto Giacometti, Donald Judd, Henry Moore, and Richard Serra is included.

Closed

Objects of Desire
Photography and the Language of Advertising

September 4–December 18, 2022
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
www.lacma.org

Objects of Desire traces the artistic manipulation of advertising through the works of photo-based artists. Since the 1970s, creative innovations have led to dramatic shifts in the possibilities for photography as artistic expression, and these artists have reworked and exploited the vocabulary and strategies of advertising to challenge the increased commodification of daily life. Through re-photography, appropriation, and simulation, these artists challenge the viewer to determine what exactly these pictures are asking of us. Work by Chris Burden and Roe Ethridge is included.

Closed

Chris Burden in
The Reason for the Neutron Bomb

June 4–October 23, 2022
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego Downtown
mcasd.org

Comprised of pieces from the museum’s collection, this exhibition presents the timely and poignant works of Chris Burden and Byron Kim. Burden’s large-scale installation, which gives the exhibition its title, was created in 1979, during the Cold War, and consists of fifty thousand nickels topped with fifty thousand matchsticks to represent the Soviet Union’s military tanks. These outnumbered the tanks in the Western Bloc’s collective armies by more than two to one at the time—a fact the US military used to justify its development of nuclear weapons.

Closed

Chris Burden in
Climate Changing: On Artists, Institutions, and the Social Environment

January 30–May 9, 2021
Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus
wexarts.org

Climate Changing foregrounds contemporary artists’ engagement with social issues and shaping institutions—an engagement that has become all the more critical during the entwined crises of systemic racism and COVID-19. Together the works in the exhibition encourage a collective reimagining of our social environment. In addition to presenting nine commissioned works, the exhibition restages a work commissioned for the Center’s inaugural year: Chris Burden’s Wexner Castle (1990). By adding battlements to the brick sections of the building’s deconstructivist design (a reference to the Armory that once stood on its site), the late artist’s work encourages visitors to reflect on the role museums play in today’s society.

Closed

Disonata
Arte en sonido hasta 1980

September 23, 2020–March 1, 2021
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
www.museoreinasofia.es

This exhibition, whose English title is Disonata: Art in Sound up to 1980, analyzes the development of sound as a creative field of visual arts differentiated from music across the first eighty years of the twentieth century. The show reflects the efforts of artists who resorted to sound beyond its traditional use in such manifestations as mixed-media work, poetry, and theater. Work by  Chris Burden and Nam June Paik is included.

September 24–December 27, 2020
Kanal–Centre Pompidou, Brussels
kanal.brussels

Curated by artist John Armleder, All of the Above was inspired by his memories of feeling that he was being observed in return by the cultural artifacts he saw when he visited museums and temples as a child. This exhibition seeks to reproduce that experience by presenting a constellation of works by more than forty artists on a large multilevel platform to form a landscape that visitors can explore from a distance. Work by Chris Burden, Olivier Mosset, and Blair Thurman is included.