Recorded live at the Stony Island Arts Bank with the Chicago Architecture Biennial

Robert Burnier joins Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews for a wide-ranging conversation that moves between sculpture, drawing, divination systems, urban planning, Mondrian, Agnes Martin, and the politics of place.

Known for his bent and torsioned aluminum works—objects that hold gesture, decision, and duration in their skins—Burnier talks about a recent body of drawings made while traveling between Europe and South Africa. Working on translucent washi paper, the pieces attempt to register light, color, and spatial memory rather than image, emerging from time spent in Cape Town's Bo-Kaap and the erased landscape of District Six. The discussion connects these experiences to Burnier's upbringing in Oak Park and to larger questions about how communities are structured, protected, or destroyed through seemingly mundane formal decisions.

From there the conversation spirals outward into the role of myth, tarot, and Yoruba divination as models for thinking through chaos, and into the slow time of art as a counterpoint to the speed of contemporary media. Lorezetti's Allegory of Good and Bad Government becomes a touchstone for considering how abstraction can carry ethical or civic attitude without becoming propaganda, and how form itself can function as content.

Throughout, Burnier frames sculpture and drawing as "sites of possibility" rather than statements—tuning forks for thought that ask viewers to complete the work through their own duration and attention.

The episode closes with talk of new material directions following a recent Pollock-Krasner grant and an ongoing commitment to work that never fully resolves, but keeps adjusting—open, provisional, and in motion.

Images courtesy of Andrew Rafacz Gallery.

Zulua Ĉ iela Kapo, 2025 (top) Acrylic on aluminum

Nebulaj Ćeloj (Soyinka IV), 2023 (bottom) Acrylic on aluminum

• Robert Burnier – https://www.robertburnier.com
• Andrew Rafacz Gallery – https://andrewrafacz.com
• Corvi-Mora (London) – https://www.corvi-mora.com
• Bad at Sports – https://badatsports.com
• Lumpen Radio (WLPN 105.5 FM) – https://lumpenradio.com
• Agnes Martin – https://www.moma.org/artists/3787
• Ambrogio Lorenzetti – The Allegory of Good and Bad Government https://www.wga.hu/html_m/l/lorenzet/ambrogio/governme/index.html
• Bo-Kaap (Cape Town) – https://www.capetown.travel/areas/bo-kaap/
• Buddhism – https://www.britannica.com/topic/Buddhism
• Chicago Architecture Biennial – https://www.chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org
• Christopher Wool – https://gagosian.com/artists/christopher-wool/
• District Six Museum – https://www.districtsix.co.za
• Oak Park, Illinois – https://www.oak-park.us
• Piet Mondrian – https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/piet-mondrian-1654
• School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) – https://www.saic.edu
• Schopenhauer – https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/
• Stony Island Arts Bank – https://rebuild-foundation.org/site/stony-island-arts-bank
• Takashi Murakami – https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Takashi_Murakami/1
• Tarot – https://www.britannica.com/topic/tarot
• Yoruba Divination (Ifá) – https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ifa