
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MCKENZIE FINE ART, NEW YORK
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MCKENZIE FINE ART, NEW YORK
In her 60-by-60-inch 3:18 PM 9/22/14, five rectangles of color overlap, with a thick bright yellow creeping in from the upper right corner, threatening to blot out the dark green underneath. In the bordering steely blue expanse, underlying layers peek through—exposed, then covered, then revealed again.
Some surfaces have been scoured with sandpaper until rough and transparently thin, fading into other colors. Some are highly polished and almost reflective in their opacity. In 11:03 AM 9/01/14, a lime-green expanse is both, bisected on the diagonal into glossy and matte. Simultaneously vibrant and fading, joyful and pensive, Burns’s paintings are testaments to their own making, and to the inevitability—and potential beauty—of decay.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2015 issue of ARTnews on page 87.