Burland

François Burland uses brown paper to explore a world of animals, imaginary beings, shadows, and the occasional monster, shot through with a tribal rhythm and swept up in a trance-like dance. Burland is himself surprised to discover the direction his artworks take, as he works without preconceived concepts and lets the drawings come to him. He was born in Lausanne in 1958 to a Swiss father and French mother and spent his childhood Sundays painting with his Swiss grandmother. He spent his holidays with his maternal grandparents in France, where he developed a passion for other cultures: their house was filled with trinkets from all over the world and he rubbed shoulders with pieds noirs1, veterans from the Indochina war, and gypsies in the local village. Their stories fed his imagination. François decided to leave the family home at seventeen to make his own way in the world. Finding it difficult to cope with life, he turned to creativity as a form of resistance. He is entirely self-taught, refusing categorically to study painting in a traditional academic setting. His art was exhibited at the Galerie Rivolta in Lausanne in 1980, where it caught the attention of Michel Thévoz, the then curator of the Collection de l’Art Brut, who purchased several of the works. Subsequently, François Burland travelled in the Orient and in Algeria, where the first encounter with the Sahara and the friendship of the Tuaregs, intrigued by his presence, marked him deeply. The works that have arisen from his unusual path are the sublime flotsam of his experience of testing the limits and of his inward gaze. New mythologies, where wit battles it out with war and where animals amble along with humans, unfurl, forming a rampart against disenchantment with the world. His work has been shown at the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne and the Halle Saint-Pierre and the Maison Rouge in Paris, attracting a great deal of interest and leading to a number of international exhibitions, as well as articles and book-length studies devoted to his art. François Burland is now one of a handful of self-taught artists who began their careers on the margins of art but who now enjoy a very wide audience.

1 French men and women born in the former colony of Algeria

Burland

Contemporary

Drawing

Artist born François Burland in 1958 in Lausanne, Switzerland. 

Themes
Tribal, voyage