Sigrid Burton

Travel—to Italy, China and India, among many places—has been a key source of inspiration and evolution in Burton's work. In 1994, she was awarded an Indo-American Senior Research Fellowship from the Fulbright Program to study the meaning and use of color in traditional Indian art and ritual forms. She followed with postgraduate work in the South Asian Studies at Columbia University in New York City (1996–9). Burton's work has been used for covers for Janice Moore Fuller's book of poems, Sex Education and The Poetry Project, and appeared in The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Interior Design, and House Beautiful, hanging in featured homes of collectors.

While best known for her painting, Burton has throughout her career created mixed-media works on paper that recall Kurt Schwitters and Paul Klee and use pencils, pastels, oil sticks and collage. Her later works on paper, such as Maroc (2013–6), repurpose old drawings and accumulated ephemera from Burton's travels and from scrapbooks of her grandparents; the choice of collaged material is often intentionally but cryptically biographical or autobiographical. These later drawings explore a deeper sense of space and figure-ground ambiguity which has crossed over to her paintings.

In addition to her art career, Burton has taught for and served on the Board of Directors for LEAP (Learning through an Expanded Arts Program) in the New York City school system, volunteered and wrote a manual for AIDS service organizations, and been appointed to the Manhattan Community Board 2 (2007-2012). In 2013, she returned to Pasadena with her husband, Max Brennan, where she serves on the Board of Trustees for the Westridge School.

In 2001, the pharmaceutical firm, Merck & Company, commissioned Burton to create a suite of site-specific paintings for the concourse of its global headquarters in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey; the colorful installation represented her first permanent environment of works in direct dialogue with one another. Throughout the 2000s, Burton has continued to work in modulated monochrome fields with sparse organic forms, blurring the line between image and pure abstraction. Reviewing a 2005 exhibition, Peter Frank wrote, Burton's "canvasses enfold the eye in baths of light and color," depicting "some half-remembered, half-imagined experience, a dream so aqueous, it might have been dreamt in the womb.” Burton's paintings in the 2010s are increasingly informed by astronomy. These works, such as Asterisms (2019, above), are less focused on figure-ground relationships, and more abstract, with greater depth of field and dense, layered gestural drawing that has a scrawled, calligraphic quality.

Burton's work is included in numerous corporate, private and public collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rockefeller Foundation, John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Palm Springs Desert Museum, Mullin Automotive Museum, Bucknell University, and Lewis and Clark College, among others. She has received commissions from Merck & Company (2001), Georgetown Plaza, New York (1990), and the Glick Organization (1986). Burton has been recognized with a Fulbright Indo-American Senior Research Fellowship (1994-1995), a Rockefeller Foundation Arts Residency at the Bellagio Study Center in Italy (1985), and a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award through the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1977). She has been a visiting artist at Delhi College of Art, the Chautauqua Institution, and Virginia Tech. In 2019, Burton was recognized by the Westridge School as its 2019 Mary Lowther Ranney Distinguished Alumna Award recipient.

After an extended stay in India in 1995, during a time of personal loss as well as the AIDS crisis, Burton again re-evaluated her art and its ability to express the totality of experience. She emerged with darker, brooding works (frequently in reds and deep crimsons, such as The Waters of March, 1999) more rooted to everyday experience and memory, and rich in natural and multicultural allusions that appeared and dispersed amid hazy, color-saturated surfaces. Often, this work used implicit grids and loosely constructed, imagined or canonical Indian color systems as a starting point. Critics described her approach as intentional yet ambiguous, and mysterious with a "calculated inexactitude" that obscured distinctions between figure and ground, plant and animal. In 1999, Peter Frank observed, "form asserts itself in the midst of her luminous, translucent clouds of color, giving unanticipated backbone to otherwise invertebrate masses of hue and tone." William Agee noted how Burton's expansive, atmospheric spaces are "brought back to earth by passages of drawing" that allude to quotidian life and world culture; he compared her fusion of these pictorial opposites to that of Matisse.

After an art residency at the Bellagio Study Center in Italy in 1985, Burton experimented with painted borders and frames within the picture plane, as well as abstracted biomorphic elements, color, and light derived from observed nature and landscape studies. Arts Magazine critic Tony Towle wrote that her "large, lush and colorful" oils had a richness suggesting pastels; calling them "mysteriously semi-abstract," he contrasted Burton's increased figuration—suggesting "timeless, overgrown gardens" (notably in the diptych Notes from an Italian Journal (for Gene and Betye))—with her vigorous brushwork, high-key palette, and multi-colored borders, which heightened an opposing sense of ambiguity and unreality. Towle likened the work to that of Arshile Gorky—without his torment—calling the result "a tranquil, dreamlike landscape" that felt primeval yet lacked menace.” Burton worked in this semi-abstract fashion into the 1990s, often alluding to landscapes and objects from her ongoing travels.

Burton's early acrylic paintings of the 1970s, featuring broad swaths and pooled abstract color, were indebted to Color field painting and traditions running through Rothko, Matisse and Impressionism, back to Titian. By the late 1970s, however, she felt constrained by the remoteness of formalism and looked to artists who merged abstraction with direct or referential imagery, such as Lois Lane and Terry Winters. Rethinking her working method, she switched to oil paint (for its greater textural and chromatic qualities), worked upright using brushes (for greater control) on stretched canvasses rather than on the floor, and incorporated drawing that broadly referenced recognizable, more personal content. Chicago Tribune critic Alan Artner called the new work "promising" and "lyrical," noting that its linear, gestural elements and areas of thick paint departed from Frankenthaler's work, while the color and feeling evoked Burton's California roots. The Louisville Courier Journal described the work as active and exuberant, with "a varied and resourceful color vocabulary" and fleeting hints of landscape.

Burton was born in Pasadena, California to Gene and Betye (Monell) Burton, both enthusiastic art patrons. She went to Westridge School for Girls (1963–9), where performance artist Barbara T. Smith was a teacher and mentor; Burton assisted her on the well-known performance, Ritual Meal (1969), and participated in Allan Kaprow's Fluids (1967). After attending the University of California, Berkeley, she completed a BA degree (1973) at Bennington College, Vermont, studying with Pat Adams, Carol Haerer and Sidney Tillim. Burton moved to New York City to work as a studio assistant to painter Helen Frankenthaler, and subsequently, Jules Olitski; she assisted Frankenthaler on the painted-tile series, Thanksgiving Day (1973), exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum. During that time she began exhibiting professionally, in group shows at the American Academy of Arts and Letters and solo exhibitions at Artists Space (1976) and Salander O'Reilly (1980) in New York, Martha White (Louisville, 1982–4), Ivory Kimpton (San Francisco, 1984–7), Patricia Hamilton Gallery (New York and Santa Monica, 1986–90) and Hokin Kaufman (Chicago, 1987–90), among others.