Alexandra von Burg lives and creates in Ticino. In 2000 she began her important artistic career as a self-taught artist. She started by painting on silk and soon moved on to acrylic painting on canvas, using mixed techniques and new experimentations. Since 2001, she has presented at various artistic events of national and international importance.
In 2002 she became a member of the Association of Painters & Sculptors of Ticino. She loves her homeland, its mountains and the intimacy of those places that she shares with her young pupils of the painting course she created, aimed at local children and hosts in her atelier in Tesserete. The Ticino environment envelops and protects her, and at the same time, she envelops and protects that splendid setting by painting various murals on public buildings and private homes. Her works blend into the landscape, live in the houses and on the walls so that her activity becomes an extension of her soul. Her research grows with her, and her environment evolves with her.
Although Alexandra admits to loving solitude and needing her own space, from 2014 to 2021, she took on the role of president of the Association of Painters & Sculptors of Ticino. This role enabled her to make further social and cultural contributions to her community. A solitary soul who loves people, she is linked to the world by an invisible thread, discreet and subtle but at the same time resistant like the textile fibre that is obtained from the cocoon of the silkworm. She perpetuates the same dynamics of life as the silkworm, which closes itself up in its cocoon, in its house, isolated from the world, to produce its precious natural fabric in extreme isolation. Only at the end of her long weaving work, the artist, by now a chrysalis, is ready for the exhibition to meet the public.
Only now can it open up to its final metamorphosis: the butterfly. These stupendous beings flaunt their beauty for a few hours, like the glory of artists who enjoy the contact and feedback of the public for the duration of their exhibitions. Alexandra serenely lives with these harmonic contradictions that characterise her art as well as her life: she tells us about and paints the sea but lives in the mountains, she paints for herself, escaping into her beloved solitude, but she does not disdain public events as long as they are as brief as the life of a moth. The most important element in her painting is colour, which always represents her state of mind that can be contained but not dominated by forms.
Modern cameras cannot capture the blue of her works; it must be seen in person; otherwise, it is lost, and even if it is of the sky or the sea, it is not always the result of a serene state of mind. Red, on the other hand, is almost always absent. The little that does appear is the protagonist, overbearing and gloomy, hieratic and reflective, just like her masks. These austere sculptures conceal the human figure, undefined in her works.
Art is a need, and Alexandra von Burg’s need is to sacrifice herself in each work, like the life cycle of a butterfly.
Enjoy even more @ Alexandra Von Burg World
Article edit by Prof. Luca Caricato
Luca Caricato – The World of Art
Leonardo Da Vinci Scholar
Art Historian – Art Expert