The first solo exhibition in a state art gallery by internationally acclaimed, Western Australian-born artist, Tim Burns.
A protean figure, Tim Burns (b.1947, Cunderdin) is one of Australia’s pre-eminent conceptual artists. His oeuvre has long been fugitive; variously and at times intentionally, by the artist himself, dissembled, obfuscated and ventriloquized.
Spanning his six-decade career, this exhibition showcases Burns’s unique contributions to the fields of performance, video and conceptual art, his formative role in experimental filmmaking and his talents as a painter, a skill he learned under the tutelage of his high-school art teacher, landscape artist Robert Juniper AM (1929-2012).
The Kinetic Moments includes paintings, works on paper, artist’s books, films, video works, ephemera and archival material, with more than 35 works by the artist and collaborators from major Australian public and private collections on display. From original performance documentation unseen since the 1970s, to paintings completed as recently as 2025, the exhibition charts Burns’s development from a radical artist into an artistic force majeure.
At the exhibition’s core is Burns’s first work in the State Art Collection, Resumé 73-77, acquired by the Gallery in 1980 and never previously shown in full. A single-edition deconstructed artist’s book that is both self-deprecatory and defiant, the work documents one of Burns’s most radical and productive artmaking periods and journeys across cities, countries and art movements. Set between his earliest surviving paintings from 1969 and his later forays into super-8 filmmaking, this work, and by extension the exhibition, reveals Burns’s continual positioning of himself as an artist at the intersection of radical politics, academic enquiry and conceptual provocations.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 260 page catalogue that is the first published book on the artist’s career. It features new writing by exhibition curator Aimee Dodds and Dr Edward Colless.
Image credits – Tim Burns Self Portrait as a Mine Site 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 122 x 183 cm. Courtesy of the Artist. © Tim Burns.
Tim Burns Poster: Exploding sandhill January 1974. Screenprint, printed in black ink, from one stencil. Printed image 37.3 (h) x 57 (w) cm, sheet 47.5 x 70.6 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1975. Image supplied courtesy National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. © Tim Burns.
Tim Burns Extra fancy 1971. Oil and silkscreen on cotton, 76.5 x 155 cm. The University of Western Australia Art Collection, Acquired with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, 1977. © Tim Burns. Photo: Robert Frith.
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