In Familiarities, Seline Burn references familiar domestic objects and personal acquaintances, drawing from both her immediate surroundings and art historical “acquaintances.” Her work follows the tracks of her past just as much as it explores the tradition of painting. Fragments of memory and family portraits are as fundamental to her works as art history itself. Through this, the artist calls into question the way familiarity is intertwined with the internalised acceptance of our cultural traditions. Her works challenge viewers to re-examine the familiar and consider their own position. In Familiarities, Burn presents a vibrant and thought-provoking plea for questioning the assumptions that underlie our sense of the familiar.

Seline Burn’s figurative works conjure up richly symbolic pictorial worlds that unfold as visual narratives. Her distinctive colour palette, modulated by the interplay of light and shadow, contours the depicted figures. The proximity to and simultaneous distance from the protagonists oscillates between a delicately applied colour and looser, sometimes pointillist-style brushwork. This dynamic interplay draws the viewer into the scene while maintaining a sense of contemplative removal.

In the exhibition, Seline Burn introduces us to people from her own circle. The polyptych Another Supper Club features close-up portraits of her family members, painted in the style of the Old Masters. Through its complex emotional resonance and psychological insight, this work invokes Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (c. 1494–1498). However, she fragments the canonical, allowing the group dynamics and visual relationships to extend beyond the confines of the canvas. In doing so, she updates these art historical references of images that have been inscribed into the collective visual memory, thus creating artworks of the highest contemporaneity.

In her monumental work, Debutants, the artist sits on a blanket in a park with her male model. Unlike Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), the model is male, half-dressed but not nude, like Manet’s female model. Through this reversal of gender roles, Burn counters the traditional “muse” trope that has long permeated Western art. Like Manet’s painting, which drew on art-historical precedents such as Titian and Raimondi, Burn’s work also grapples with the weight of tradition, depicting a transformative scene. Rather than objectifying the male figure, she positions him as an equal participant in the scene. Although Burn is rooted in tradition, her aesthetic vocabulary and her contemporary sensibilities transport the images into the present day.

“I am a testimony to our time and paint what I live, what I collect, and what remains with me and inside of me.” – Seline Burn

Seline Burn activates our visual memory by drawing on the iconographic repertoire of art, and personal histories. In doing so, she sensitively updates the tradition of painting, creating narrative visual worlds that oscillate between fleeting moments and symbolic charge. In the exhibition Familiarities, Burn confronts us with intimate depictions of family relationships, childhood memories, and internalised processes – offering a window into her own (self-)reflective painterly practice. We encounter Burn’s surroundings, but in particular, we encounter Seline Burn herself. Her subtle, constructed compositions merge the personal and the universal, the familiar and the iconic, inviting emotional and intellectual engagement. Burn’s strategic dialogue with art historical references grounds her work in tradition, while her vibrant color palettes and contemporary, in some ways rebellious, aesthetic approach propel these motifs into the present, resulting in a body of work that is both deeply rooted and refreshingly modern.

Nathalie Gallus