Kathe burkhart biography channel

Kathe Burkhart is best known for her “Liz Taylor” series (1982-ongoing), a self-portrait project in which the late iconic actress serves as the artist’s double. Speaking about the paintings, artist Cady Noland once described Burkhart’s surrogate, a sexually dominant woman, as a “living repudiation of the fallacy that appetites are the province of men.”1 Combining appropriated film stills and autobiographical collage elements with provocative slurs and double entendres (hole, beaver, up yours!), these large-scale works, with their ribald humor and feminist-punk attitude, earned Burkhart a “bad girl” reputation early on. Whether brandishing a whip, screaming obscenities or possessing a dick, Burkhart’s Liz presciently explores femdom fantasies and evokes the artist’s genderqueer identity as an intersex woman.

Over time this was expressed through S&M-inflected themes, which soon extended to other bodies of work. “Hardcore” (1999-2013) is a series of digital photos on canvas that present sex shop window displays shot from the street in Amsterdam’s red light district. The XY Portfolio (2012/14), a photographic homage to Mapplethorpe, Hans Bellmer and Unica Zürn, features the bound and corseted body

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Suck them in with beauty, knock them out with the truth: An Interview with Kathe Burkhart

Clad in her signature all-black attire and plum-colored lipstick, with a pensive disposition and a laugh that can only be described as infectious, the artist Kathe Burkhart presides regally over the massive paintings and wooden haiku letters that fill her light-dappled, paint-spattered Brooklyn studio. Black-and-white stills from Elizabeth Taylor films, old love letters and lists of materials are pasted to the walls; tubes and cans of acrylic paint, mannequin parts and other random artistic accoutrements litter the desks and floors. Burkhart takes me on a tour through the studio—which is gargantuan by New York standards—first the room mainly occupied by her infamous Liz Taylor paintings, which are awe-inspiringly large in person; then the living room area, the walls of which are adorned with several of her nude photographs (mostly taken on a nude beach in Spain); then the bedroom, which houses her S&M Series—a collection of paintings of various medieval torture devices, each inspired by and named after a different ex-lover (“I stopped because I ran out of boyfriends!” Burkhart confesses); the “print room,” in which Burkhart keeps many of her prints, drawings and photograp