Exploring "Pop Geometry" With Arizona Artist Andy Burgess

Until Andy Burgess moved from London to Tucson almost 30 years ago, his passion for modernist architecture was purely academic. But something about the sunlight, blue skies and landscapes he encountered on this side of the pond sent his artwork spinning in a new direction. “I’d always loved the minimalism, straight lines and abstract planes of midcentury buildings,” he says. “But seeing them in person made me want to translate that to canvas.”

Whether depicting iconic houses—by the likes of Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, Donald Wexler and Marcel Breuer—or lesser-known dwellings of more contemporary vintage, Burgess eschews literalism for something more personal and evocative. Working in a genre he describes as “pop geometry,” Burgess supercharges his rectilinear compositions with richly pigmented colors in acrylic or oil—“mostly acrylic, nowadays,” he notes—that glow off the canvas and highlight spatial relationships. He also plays with proportions and freely adds elements—a pool, foliage, mountains—to invent settings that feel both fresh and familiar.

Burgess often embarks by photographing a house or creating sketches that evolve into small gouache studies before being scaled up. Or he might use an image he finds online. “By the time I’m done, it doesn’t look that much like the original,” Burgess says. But, he notes, the results aren’t always completely unrecognizable. “I’ve had experiences where someone spots a painting at an art fair, then calls up and says, ‘You know, I designed that house!’ And they are always flattered. They realize I’ve taken their work as a starting point and transformed it.”

When not painting, Burgess creates intricate, mosaic-like collages by cutting up the thousands of vintage matchbooks, postcards, ticket stubs, old book linens and other ephemera he’s collected for decades. The artist composes as he goes—building everything from abstract works to fantastical panoramas to cityscapes of places such as Chicago or New York.

This December, Burgess will show his work through Cynthia Corbett Gallery at Art Miami, an appropriately sun-soaked backdrop to his idyllic painted worlds. Hovering between abstraction and realism, with a subtext of nostalgia, the pieces invite viewers in—to dangle their feet in the cool water, feel the warm air and hear the sound of ice clinking in cocktail glasses. As Burgess says, “I want to evoke emotion.”