Bobbie Burgers: Enfleurage

Bobbie Burgers’ latest series of paintings represents a marked shift in both their composition and source of inspiration. While previous series have evolved out of Burgers’ personal experiences, Enfleurage draws from a book by Jean-Claude Ellena titled The Atlas of Perfumed Botany, an exploration of the creation of perfumes. Burgers connected immediately to the complexities of extracting scents from flowers. For several years now, she has been gradually distilling flowers with paint into their most abstracted, minimal forms. 

Enfleurage derives its title from the process by which florals are laid down on glass and pressed into the surface. Burgers envisions this technique in paint and other mixed media, creating more layering and density in her work than ever before. Her floral subjects appear bold and energetically pushed up against the surface of the paintings, while lighter stains and other expressive mark-marking evoke the extracted liquid.

"In one technique, called enfleurage, petals are carefully layered in an odorless fat to extract scent over days, and then removed and replaced with fresh flowers until a concentrated scent is captured. Reading about the difficulty of isolating aromas from natural materials, I started to draw parallels between the techniques and processes of perfumery and the work I was producing in the studio."

 

 

- Bobbie Burgers