Engraving The Bride's Dress - Balthasar Burkhard 2001

Since 1989, the Louvre Museum and the Réunion des musées nationaux have entrusted contemporary artists with the task of producing engraved plates for Chalcographie, which ensures the exclusivity of the print run, without limitation on the number of prints.

Very different trends in contemporary art are represented. Geneviève Asse meets Georg Baselitz, Pierre Courtin, Jean-Pierre Pincemin, Pat Steir, Jean-Michel Alberola, Robert Morris, Louise Bourgeois, Marcus Raetz, Pierre Alechinsky or Agathe May.

It is a falcon's wing, as there are others at Balthasar Burkhard - raven or swan wings. Will it open, will it fold back along the body after a beat? A silky river of silvery spots and dark touches that disappear on a night background. Woman's set.

The Swiss artist is a photographer. It frames human and animal figures, plants and shells, waterfalls and rolls of waves, bodies and portraits, limbs and isolated organs taken as close-ups and details.
But his work is not confined to the object, opening up to the landscaped space. He contemplates from above the grid of immense suburbs (Mexico City) or from afar the backwash of the deserts (Namibia).

His art is to transmute fleeting visions into coats of arms, realism into abstraction, with a surprisingly vibrant sensitivity, where the shadow plays with the laughs of light.

For the past ten years, Burkhard has been willing to use gravure printing to provide its images with the density of blacks and the spectrum of values specific to this technology developed a century and a half ago to provide stability and permanence through copper engraving to photographs that are always threatened by entropy.
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