Kathe Burkhart

Kathe Burkhart is an American interdisciplinary artist and writer who lives and works in New York and Amsterdam. Her works has been provocative from the outset and she is credited as the original “bad girl”.  Working since the early 1980s, Burkhart has consistently and frankly engaged gender roles, sexuality, celebrity, performativity, and language in an interdisciplinary practice. Her Liz Taylor Series uses Pop Art imagery and assemblage to critique representation and the sexual politics of identity. The images of Liz overlaid with profanities provide a platform in which Burkhart addresses feminist resistance, female dominance and sexual power. A prolific writer, Regency Arts Press published his first monograph, Liz Taylor: The First 25 Years, 1982-2007 in published in 2008 and written by Irving Bennett Ellis and Hard Core Still Lifes, 2005 published by Moti Hasson Gallery, New York, and, she has been working on a manuscript titled Dudes, which she declared to be “almost pornography”). Burkhart’s more recent series in which she depicts ex-lovers’ portraits as medieval torture instruments together with photographs of window displays in Amsterdam sex shops, clearly demonstrate the consistency with which the artist continues to empower both herself and her viewers.