Tom Burckhardt | FRESHF LOWERS

High Noon is pleased to present New York based artist Tom Burckhardt’s second exhibition with the gallery, FRESHF LOWERS. Merging abstract and representational forms with art historical modernist motifs, Burckhardt constructs layered pictorial environments that serve as wry, poetic commentaries on the political and cultural moment. He pushes abstraction beyond the purely formal, infusing it with conceptual irony and a deep engagement with the absurdities of contemporary life.

 

The works were created in the artist’s studio in Searsmont, Maine, a site layered with personal history. First occupied by his mother who he later shared it with, and now fully his own since her recent passing, the studio has become a place of both continuity and transformation. Its expanded physical and psychic space has allowed Burckhardt to create his most ambitious paintings to date, greater in scale and atmospheric scope and rooted in the materiality of paint— its weight, drag, and capacity to smear, scrape, and accumulate. Both the language of abstraction and the physical substance become carriers for metaphor, allowing both to speak in equal measure.

 

The title FRESHF LOWERS stems from a chance encounter: a flower shop awning in New York’s Ridgewood neighborhood that read with a misplaced space, uncorrected through design, approval, and fabrication. This small oversight instead becomes a lens through which Burckhardt considers the world: a chain of minor mistakes resulting in a public, permanent, and unintentionally comical statement. The phrase is double-edged: a glib commentary on the “fresh lows” of our collective moment, and an homage to the simple, unassailable beauty of flowers. When each morning’s headlines reveal new evidence of human folly and corruption— shocking, yet strangely predictable— we’re reminded that the absurd is not the opposite of the expected, but often its inevitable twin.

 

This framing gives the paintings a conceptual charge: the possibility that meaning arises not from precision, but from misalignment, interruption, and awkward juxtapositions. Each painting begins with a gradient of color moving from one edge of the spectrum to the other, serving as both a literal foundation and a metaphor for dualities. From there, Burckhardt scrapes, scumbles, and finger-paints his way into layered, colliding systems that seem both constructed and eroded, functional and fragmentary.

 

“I think I’ve always been a collagist painter,” he explains, “Because I’m putting things together that have a kind of poetic logic, where they’re mashed up together in a way where it’s a fait accompli by me to present it as such. They literally end up belonging together because, there they are, but there’s always an inherent kind of awkwardness of dislocation and of the edges of things. And I think that awkward quality—the unfittingness of it—is actually an interesting energy to embed in the work.”

 

The Grabber, 2025, is named for both the drama of its scale and the method through which Burckhardt renders linear forms by lifting the paint with his finger, often rehabilitating it elsewhere. A cluster-like plume of orange emerges from a blue landscape of tangled detritus both mechanical and geological, while an animated finger-painted jet stream zigzags its way through from behind and into the space. This act of drawing on a heroic scale sets up a digital vs. analog framework, creating an almost backlit luminosity. Needed Eraser, 2024, the darkest, and most dense work in the exhibition, served as a prototype for the series. The mostly monochromatic painting flickers with undertones of quinacridone and ultramarine violets, carrying the impenetrable stasis of a Diego Rivera factory mural. Hermitage, 2025, anchors its composition in a mountainous abstraction whose profile reverberates through the sky in a cascade of suspended lines, creating a destabilizing balance of form and emptiness. The mountain’s planar divisions subtly reference Diebenkorn’s architectural planes, reimagined within a rugged, geological mass. Beneath it, a warm yellow glow rises upward, tipping the otherwise serene palette into a heightened, theatrical tension.

 

In FRESHF LOWERS, beauty, humor, and disquiet coexist in the same frame, lingering in an unstable middle ground where error is fertile. By embracing awkward conjunctions, shifting spatial relationships, and the balance between construction and erasure, the works resist tidy narratives in favor of layered, provisional truths.

 

Tom Burckhardt was born in New York City in 1964 and has spent his entire life living there. He graduated with a BFA in painting from SUNY Purchase in 1986 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture that same year. He has been exhibiting since 1992 at various NYC galleries such as George Adams Gallery, Tibor De Nagy Gallery, Pierogi, and Caren Golden Fine Art, and the Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco, CA. His most recent solo show of paintings was at George Adams Gallery NYC in January 2022. He participated in the 2016 Kochi Muziris Bienalle in Kerala, India and that installation piece, “Studio Flood” was shown at Pierogi Gallery, NYC in September 2017 and CMCA in Maine during Summer 2018. He was an artist in residence at Yaddo Foundation in New York State in January 2019 and at Pepper House, Kochi, India, in January 2020. He was a resident faculty at Skowhegan in 2007 and currently teaches part time at SUNY Purchase.