RALPH BÜRGIN | FORUM

The term “volute” derives from the Latin word “voluta”, which means “spiral curl”. In art history, it refers to an ornament or building element with a spiral-shaped, often double-sided end curl, as is particularly characteristic of Ionic column capitals in ancient Greek architecture. These famous capital forms also appear frequently in Ralph Bürgin’s current paintings. There, they mostly serve as pedestals for ancient-looking colossal heads, such as in the large-format painting Forum (2025) – which also provides the title for the exhibition. Or the columns form the foundation for a landscape with male nudes, as in the painting Isle of Men (2025).
 
One of the peculiarities of curls is that points that are spatially separated on a surface come closer together. Which perhaps also makes the volute an apt allegory for Ralph Bürgin’s art in general. For in the pictures that the artist, born in Basel in 1980, produces with a thin, glazed application of paint, various motifs and references are superimposed in an admirably casual form of condensation. In this way, the painterly and the graphic, the heavy and the light, the lived and the dreamed, the living and the petrified, the historical and the contemporary flow smoothly together. New, strangely confusing, inviting and even seductively luminous constellations are emerging.
 
Bürgin constructs his psychological arrangements like a scenographer. The play that unfolds before the audience’s eyes seems to take place in a sphere of timelessness. A whole host of art-historical references run in the background. The eternal antagonism between culture and nature has taken a break and floats in Arcadian realms. The world in these pictures appears like a park landscape in which apples, skulls or campfires appear out of nowhere like surrealistic bonus points in a computer game. The word “forum” already hints at this complexity. In ancient Rome, it was used to describe a central location in the city, where market events, jurisdiction, political and religious representation coincided spatially. Bürgin’s choice of title is evidently aimed at the diversity of forms of negotiation and the mutual dependence of different spheres.
 
In some pictures, for example La grande Terrasse (2024), there is even a kind of stage structure in the lower part of the picture – as if to emphasize the staged character of what is shown. “My pictures go through a transformation process,” explains the artist. “They function like a stage on which figures, animals and objects can appear or disappear.” The referential function of the depicted supporting structure can therefore possibly be extended to the processual character of the artistic work itself. In the painting Marble Night (2024), an owl watches over a colorful twilight landscape, through which a path winds its way into the horizon, past architecture reminiscent of a fortified building or granary. In ancient Egypt, the animal was regarded as a bird of death, while in Greece it symbolized wisdom. But even without cultural codes, this bird is wonderful. Its soft plumage and the roughened edge of its wings allow the owl to fly almost silently as it disappears into the deep night.

— Kito Nedo

Read the German version of the text here.