Biography

Raymond Burrows is an Irish artist who specializes in the medium of print and collage. His work is a cacophony of imagery influenced by contemporary media, the urban environment and the interaction between the image and architecture.

Originally from Kilkenny, Raymond has been based in Galway and New York City, a place that has had a profound effect on his work. The city with its many layers of cultures, styles, personalities and social classes have influenced his artwork.

The main areas of Raymond’s work are the art of Collage and Screenprint. His collages draw source material from the mass media world of advertising, TV, the movie industry and photojournalism. He combines them in a way that transforms their meaning and context by creating a uniform image field all over the entire area. Icons bleed over architecture, adverts cover landscapes, pornography touches patterns and headlines meet the gutter. This is most evident in his series SmartArt 101, a major body of work that was shown in its entirety in the Galway Museum in 2011. What began as a game of scrabble, evolved into a collection of 101 large canvasses printed from original collages that aimed to express the artists feelings about modern life by portraying humanity’s culture in an apparently chaotic way. While the artworks appear disordered the underlying theme and meaning for each element was carefully considered.

Raymond’s screenprints are drawn from his interest in stencil work and how graffiti in a public space can alter its appearance. Sometimes this alteration is dramatic but he is also drawn to the seemingly innocuous and often overlooked aspect of street culture. These elements include signposts, tightly cropped views of poster and tag covered street corners, snapshots of everyday life in an urban environment, distorted architectural forms and advertising. Through using stencils he presents them in a stylized and graphic form.

The variant and repetitive nature of screen-printing allows the artist to use the same elements over again, almost in a self referencing ironic way. Some of the more abstract scenes are reminiscent of Andy Warhols Execution and Death Prints. Other influences are the Ashcan Style, Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey, the street artist Swoon, and Jean Michel Basquiat.

Raymond also approaches the collage technique in another way. By placing various elements together by overlaying them or by cut-out, he then photographs them thereby creating a once off print, unique in time and place. It is an object that does not exist and if it did, only briefly. This ad hoc way of creating imagery is a very exciting element of his work.

A word from the Artist

I am currently completing a new series of twenty works which will be available to view in 2012.

Exhibitions

2011 - Galway City Museum, Solo Exhibition and Artist in Residence for the month of April

2009 - Murrays Financial Services Office, Galway, Solo Exhibition

2007 - Habitat Dublin & Habitat Galway, Solo Exhibition

2007 - White Room Gallery Galway, 1rst Solo Exhibition

Collections

Radisson SAS Hotel, Galway

Private Collections in Ireland