Kathe Burkhart

The respected New York painter Kathe Burkhart is best known internationally for her Liz Taylor Series, a Feminist conceptual project that is more a highly performative serial work than a simple body of paintings and drawings devoted to this iconic and perpetually complicated Hollywood muse. In Burkhart's work, Taylor's multiple personae--actress, vixen, Hollywood royalty, serial wife and divorcée, party girl, charitable humanitarian, entrepreneur, rebel, dominant woman--together form a media-based mirror of contemporary female identity. Derived from tabloid and paparazzi shots, film stills and publicity photos and often emblazoned with highly charged expressions of profanity, the paintings portray the actress as a two-dimensional doppelgänger for the artist herself--caught in the act of reclaiming female sexuality and power. This comprehensive volume, arranged in chronological order, presents Burkhart's series-in-progress at its 25-year mark. Consistently intense and obsessively focused, it is a relentlessly powerful experience.