by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Sixteen years ago, Chris Burmeister walked past a gallery in San Diego and saw a Roy Lichtenstein.
He said to himself, "Someday, when I graduate from college, I'd like to own that."
He bought it after graduation and has been collecting art
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ever since.
Jonson Gallery Curator Chip Ware pawed through Burmeister's collection for a show called "Living With Art: Modern Masters," which opens Friday at the Jonson
Gallery.
"I'm kind of an anti-collector collector," Burmeister said. "I don't like the pretentiousness of art. I think it sucks. So, I buy locally."
Besides local artists, he's accumulated works by Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Kiki Smith, Agnes Martin, Jeff Koons, Wes Mills, Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein - to name a few. Their works are in the show along with about 38 other artists.
"Chip picked some cool stuff, some funny stuff, old pop artist minimalist stuff. Very contemporary," he said.
Ware took about a third of Burmeister's collection.
"It was tremendously difficult to cull it down to what I thought would fit in the gallery, what would fit well together," Ware said. "He has so many things."
Ware said his favorite is a small, white, three-dimensional nylon stereograph of a cluttered living room by Rachel Whiteread that epitomizes Burmeister's
apartment.
"It's very intimate and speaks to Chris' sensibility," he said. "He's got a small apartment, and I wouldn't call it in disarray, but he's got so much artwork, (and) he can't display it all, so he has it stored in closets and wherever it will fit. It's like having your furniture available, but you can't put it out yet."
There's also a written piece by Richard Prince that reads, "Fireman (pulling drunk out of a burning bed): You darn fool, that'll teach you to smoke in bed! Drunk: I wasn't smoking in bed, it was on fire when I laid down."
In the next room, there's a yellow ball made from gaffer's tape that reads, "pro model."
"There's a kind of jokiness to a lot of these things," Ware said. "The Tom Sachs wall ball - he makes these funny anti-craft objects, referring to this kind of high culture, but it's very lowbrow at the same time, like the fact that this is gaffers tape and it says pro model. Give me a break."
Then there's a Hirst piece called "LSD," a big square with colored dots evenly spaced. When you stare at it, they begin to move, and you get the sensation you're tripping
on acid.
Also, look for Mill's "The Hand of God," which is probably the weirdest piece in the show. It's a tiny pencil drawing on a square block. Out of gray pencil sky slides a monster hand over some fighter jets. The title is written in the middle of the artwork. It's something you'd see produced by a schizophrenic locked to his table at an asylum.
Good stuff.
Burmeister will be at the opening, which is from 5 to 7 p.m.
"I got the whole crew coming out," he said. "We will definitely be art gangsters. It will be good."
"Living With Art:
Modern Masters"
Jonson Gallery
Opens Friday 5 p.m.
