Dennis Burton (artist)


Dennis Burton was a Canadian modernist painter.

Biography

He was born on December 6, 1933 in Lethbridge, Alberta, Dennis Burton won a scholarship to Pickering College in Newmarket, and then attended the Ontario College of Art, studying with Jock Macdonald and Fred Hagan. He worked as a graphic designer for the Canadian Broadcasting Company until 1960 when he began painting full-time.
An exhibition in 1955 of Painters Eleven at Toronto's Hart House which he visited with his friend, artist Gordon Rayner, turned him towards abstraction. Under the influence of the neo-Dada movement current in Toronto in the late 1950s and first half of the 1960s, Burton began to create sculpture using scrap metal and found materials welded together.
He showed his work with Toronto's Isaacs Gallery. For this reason, he has been called part of the Isaacs Group of artists, which include, among others, Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, John Meredith and Graham Coughtry.
Rayner had a number of public commissions, among them a mural for the Edmonton Airport in 1963. He is best known for the Garterbeltmania works of females in their underwear which he showed with the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa in his retrospective in 1977. With artists such as Joyce Wieland, he explored the erotic theme in Canadian art. These works made politician John Diefenbaker denounce Dennis Burton in the House of Commons, coining the term "garter belt-maniac".
But both before and after these works, he created large abstractions that might involve using different creative strategies involving language, colour and form.
Burton`s papers are in the Dennis Burton fonds, Edward P. Taylor Library & Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, CA ON00012 SC100.
On July 8, 2013, Dennis Burton died at age 79.

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