Which f-word best describes Kathe Burkhart’s work over the past 30 years? Feminist? Fierce? Fucked up? Allowing that the last is actually two words, I’m going to go with all three, based on this pungent show of paintings.
Presented are selections from Burkhart’s career-long series featuring Tinseltown icon Elizabeth Taylor. Limned in cadaverous whites and puke greens overlaid with nasty-woman musings that embrace the c-word, Burkhart’s canvases are plug-ugly affairs rendered in crude, outsider-ish fashion. Taken together, they’re the visual equivalent of Glenn Close boiling the bunny in Fatal Attraction, a kind of revenge porn directed at male privilege.
Taylor, who was also an obsession for Andy Warhol, is portrayed as both a victim of malignant co-dependency and as a combative alter ego though which Burkhart channels toxic femininity to assault the masculine kind.
Burkhart suggests that both off camera and on, Taylor gave as good as she got, especially in her tumultuous marriage to fellow actor Richard Burton. In one piece, Burkhart pictures Burton smacking Liz around, though in another the artist acknowledges that the abuse derived as much from calculated showmanship as it did from drinking and clashing egos.
No doubt the current #MeToo climate gives Burkhart’s work an added resonance, but it’s also clear that for this artist, time was up long ago.