LOS ANGELES, CA.- Gagosian announced its participation in Frieze Los Angeles 2025 with Nomadic Folly (2001), an enveloping large-scale installation by Chris Burden that was produced for the seventh Istanbul Biennial, incorporating locally sourced materials and objects. This is the first time that the work has been exhibited in the United States. At a profoundly difficult moment for the city of Los Angeles, this project by one of its greatest artists—perhaps his gentlest and most humanistic—offers visitors a place to gather in safety and community.
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A radical figure with a fierce political consciousness, Burden possessed a unique ability to wield conceptual art as a tool for sociopolitical change, and as a metaphor for the power dynamics of industry and institution. In a counterpoint to the more strident aspects of his practice, he also celebrated human achievement—in particular, groundbreaking architectural projects—and expressed a warm admiration for diverse ways of living. He was likewise interested in the creation of spectacle and the ways in which art might complicate one’s understanding of the material world. Burden was the first artist to be represented by Larry Gagosian, beginning in 1978.
With its colorful handmade carpets, embroidered wedding fabrics, plush pillows, braided ropes, and jewel-toned glass and metal lamps arranged on a platform of Turkish cypress topped with four large umbrellas, Nomadic Folly envelops the viewer in a dreamlike environment, combining its sensuous textiles and inviting architectural design with lulling traditional music. Burden’s fantasy of a cultivated nomad’s tent, the installation evokes a feeling of luxurious opulence via allusion to Middle Eastern aesthetics. The work also features an interactive component; visitors are welcome to enter and enjoy the space, engaging with and amplifying the inherent beauty of cultural difference.
The title of Nomadic Folly refers to the ornamental structures designed as focal points within gardens; other of Burden’s works that use the same reference include Dreamer’s Folly (2010), a set of three cast-iron gazebos reconfigured to form a single structure and draped in “tree of life” fabrics. In its architectural focus, the project also resonates with Urban Light (2008), an installation of 202 restored 1920s and 1930s streetlamps on view outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Xanadu (2008), an unrealized proposal for an idealized city. Nomadic Folly establishes a comparable arena for reverie, exploring the evocative power of its ornate historical form and furthering Burden’s inquiry into the cultural meanings of the constructed environment.
Chris Burden was born in Boston in 1946, and died in Topanga Canyon, California, in 2015. Collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Tate, London. Solo museum exhibitions include A Twenty-Year Survey, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (1988, traveled to Carnegie Mellon University Art Gallery, Pittsburgh; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, through 1989); When Robots Rule: The Two-Minute Airplane Factory, Tate Britain, London (1999); Tower of Power, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2002); 14 Magnolia Double Lamps, South London Gallery (2006); Middelheim Museum, Antwerp, Belgium (2009); Three Ghost Ships, Portland Art Museum, OR (2011–12); Magasin III, Stockholm (2012–13); Extreme Measures, New Museum, New York (2013–14); The Master Builder, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2014); and Ode to Santos Dumont, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2015).
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