A Grammar of Animacy: Charles E. Burchfield & Mike Glier at Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo

Nov 8, 2024 – Mar 2, 2025

This exhibition explores how both American artists infuse observational painting with abstraction to convey a multi-sensory experience of nature. Burchfield died 14 years after Glier was born, so they are generations apart, but both use an abstract visual language, derived from plein air observation, to describe an intimate and reciprocal relationship between the artists and their subject, the living world. They engage the full range of the senses, improvising with color, motif, and repetition to evoke abstract representations of sound, smell, and touch to describe the dynamic, multi-sensory experience of perception. And it is here, in the act of translating the sensory experience that nature provides that the two artists model a kind of reciprocity between artist and subject that reflects a vision of the natural world as partner rather than resource for exploitation.

For more information