Free and open to the public.
Please join us for a reception with Tom Burtonwood to celebrate the opening of his solo exhibition Recurring.
As a part of the Elevate series at 21c Chicago, the work will be on view from May through July in Gallery 3.
In Recurring Tom Burtonwood presents three elements of his ongoing project “A Cube is a Rectangle.” Gallery 3 features a large gridded wall installation of over 200 of Burtonwood’s signature “Würfel” drawings. Adjacent to the gallery two large “Würfels” crafted from mixed media materials including hydrocal, paint, soil, and natural fibers hang side by side. Accompanying these two-dimensional works is a new single-channel stop-frame animation of his unfolding cube motif.
Like the critical theorist Gilles Deleuze, Burtonwood maintains a Baroque sensibility, a fascination with complexity, multiplicity, and the infinite play of forms. Deleuze’s description of the Baroque fold as a "fold within a fold" resonates with Burtonwood’s layered sculptures and intricate drawings. These works reveal their complexity through a series of folds, each layer adding depth and richness to the overall structure.
Deleuze's idea of recurrence, primarily explored in Difference and Repetition (1968), challenges traditional, linear understandings of repetition. Instead of seeing recurrence as the return of the same (as in Friedrich Nietzsche's "eternal return" interpreted literally), Deleuze reimagines recurrence as the return of difference. That is, repetition is never a pure duplication—every recurrence is transformed by context, intensity, and affect.
Burtonwood’s series “A Cube is a Rectangle” reflects on the idea that true repetition is not mechanical or identical, but that it can be ”productive”—it creates something new each time. This contrasts with what Deleuze calls "generality," where repetition is based on sameness, predictability, and equivalence (like in a clock ticking or mass production). In contrast, “real” repetition occurs on a deeper, ontological level: it is singular, evental, and tied to difference.
Tom Burtonwood (b. United Kingdom) is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist, curator and educator. He/they are Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He/they holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University (USA) and a BA from Loughborough College of Art (UK).
Recent venues presenting Burtonwood's work include 21c Museum Hotel Chicago, Chicago; Bert Green Fine Art, Chicago; Taiteen Talo and Tramhall, both Turku, Finland; MOM Art Space, Hamburg, Germany; MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Center, Helsinki, Finland; Material, Chicago; The Donut Shop, Chicago; DesignLab Gallery, Pasadena, CA; Dock 6, Chicago, IL; Monaco, St. Louis, MO; Platform, Evanston; Riverside Art Center, Riverside, IL.
Burtonwood is a member of the international art collective videokaffe and a board member and co-organizer of Terrain Exhibitions, an Oak Park-based not-for-profit arts organization. Terrain makes private space public through sculpture, installation, performance, and interventions. Apart from Terrain he/they have curated over twenty exhibitions of contemporary art working with Chicago-based artist-run galleries GARDENfresh (2002 - 2009) and What It Is (2010 - 2015).
Image: 66 Würfels exhibited at material, Chicago, 2024. Photo by Nathan Keay.
