Tim Burns – The Kinetic Moments

About

The first solo exhibition in a state art gallery by internationally acclaimed, Western Australian-born artist, Tim Burns.

A protean figure, Tim Burns is one of Australia's pre-eminent conceptual artists. His oeuvre has long been fugitive; variously and at times intentionally, by the artist himself, dissembled, obfuscated and ventriloquized.

Spanning his six-decade career, this exhibition showcases Burns's unique contributions to the fields of performance, video and conceptual art, his formative role in experimental filmmaking and his talents as a painter.

The Kinetic Moments includes paintings, works on paper, artist's books, films, video works, ephemera and archival material, with more than 35 works by the artist and collaborators from major Australian public and private collections on display. From original performance documentation unseen since the 1970s, to paintings completed as recently as 2025, the exhibition charts Burns's development from a radical artist into an artistic force majeure.

At the exhibition's core is Burns's first work in the State Art Collection, Resumé 73-77. A single-edition deconstructed artist's book that documents one of Burns's most radical and productive artmaking periods and journeys across cities, countries and art movements. Set between his earliest surviving paintings from 1969 and his later forays into super-8 filmmaking, this work, and by extension the exhibition, reveals Burns's continual positioning of himself as an artist at the…