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Thomas Lawson — Burn, Burn, Burn
Thomas Lawson

Burn, Burn, Burn

1982

Painted in 1982, Burn, Burn, Burn belongs to a pivotal moment in Thomas Lawson's practice when the Scottish-born, New York-based artist was interrogating the boundaries between painting and mass media imagery. Measuring 120 × 120 cm in oil on canvas, the work deploys Lawson's signature method of appropriating found photographic sources and translating them into paint with a deliberately unresolved, unsettling finish. The title's repetition carries an incantatory urgency, reinforcing the sense that the image beneath the brushwork carries emotional and political weight compressed just below the surface of legibility. Lawson was a central figure in the early 1980s Pictures Generation conversation, contributing both as a painter and as a co-founder and editor of the influential journal Real Life Magazine. His paintings from this period were understood not as a naive return to the medium but as a strategic occupation of it, using painting's cultural authority to expose the mechanisms by which images circulate, seduce, and obscure. Burn, Burn, Burn exemplifies this critical stance, presenting a surface that rewards close looking while sustaining a productive ambiguity about what, exactly, is being shown and consumed. Works by Lawson from this formative decade are held in significant institutional collections and are rarely offered on the primary or secondary market. The piece is signed by the artist and is currently available through Rolando Anselmi, a gallery with a strong curatorial commitment to artists working at the intersection of conceptual rigor and painterly practice. For collectors focused on the intellectual foundations of postmodern painting, this work represents an exceptional opportunity to acquire a historically grounded example from one of the period's most exacting critical voices.

Medium
Oil on canvas
Overall
Signed
Yes
Location
Rolando Anselmi, Rome

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About this work

Thomas Lawson, Burn, Burn, Burn, 1982

Painted in 1982, Burn, Burn, Burn belongs to a pivotal moment in Thomas Lawson's practice when the Scottish-born, New York-based artist was interrogating the boundaries between painting and mass media imagery. Measuring 120 × 120 cm in oil on canvas, the work deploys Lawson's signature method of appropriating found photographic sources and translating them into paint with a deliberately unresolved, unsettling finish. The title's repetition carries an incantatory urgency, reinforcing the sense that the image beneath the brushwork carries emotional and political weight compressed just below the surface of legibility. Lawson was a central figure in the early 1980s Pictures Generation conversation, contributing both as a painter and as a co-founder and editor of the influential journal Real Life Magazine. His paintings from this period were understood not as a naive return to the medium but as a strategic occupation of it, using painting's cultural authority to expose the mechanisms by which images circulate, seduce, and obscure. Burn, Burn, Burn exemplifies this critical stance, presenting a surface that rewards close looking while sustaining a productive ambiguity about what, exactly, is being shown and consumed. Works by Lawson from this formative decade are held in significant institutional collections and are rarely offered on the primary or secondary market. The piece is signed by the artist and is currently available through Rolando Anselmi, a gallery with a strong curatorial commitment to artists working at the intersection of conceptual rigor and painterly practice. For collectors focused on the intellectual foundations of postmodern painting, this work represents an exceptional opportunity to acquire a historically grounded example from one of the period's most exacting critical voices.

Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 120 x 120 cm
Year
1982
Signed
Hand-signed by the artist
Seen at
Rolando Anselmi, Rome

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Mohn Art Collective

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