MICHAEL BURTCH: ARTIST

Author: Michael Burtch 1987

An excerpt from publication accompanying the exhibition. (front cover pictured on the left)

"Throughout history the human figure has been the most significant and the most problematical symbol in our visual lexicon. It evokes fear, awe, pathos, mortality and immortality, sexuality, beauty, and all the complex nuances of meaning that lie between. Underlying our fascination for the human figure is the fundamental reason for its power: it reflexes, presents, or re-presents our "double", our posed image; it holds up to our gaze the shifting, fragmented mirror of our "selves" and the public self-the persona, the "other" that permeates and constructs our "image" before the ungraspable flux of our primal being. In spite of or perhaps because of the odds against locating the human figure's precise significance in our mediated understanding of existence, the figure is still the basis of obsessive representation."