Dennis Burton (1933 - 2013)

Dennis Eugene Norman Burton was a Canadian modernist who was born in Lethbridge, Ontario. He attended the Ontario College of Art from 1952 to 1956, and worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as a graphic designer until 1960.

Inspired by a 1955 exhibition of the “Painters Eleven” at Toronto’s Hart House, as well as American Abstract Expressionist artists such as Robert Motherwell, Jack Tworkov, and Willem de Kooning, Burton shifted his focus toward abstraction in the mid-1950s.

Burton showed with the famed Isaacs Gallery in Toronto, becoming one of the youngest members on the gallery’s roster. A talented musician, he also played saxophone in the Artist’s Jazz Band in Toronto - a pioneering Canadian free-jazz group formed in 1962 by Toronto visual artists associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement and loosely affiliated with the Isaacs Gallery.

Burton was the co-founder of Toronto’s New School of Art in 1965, assuming the role of director from 1971 to 1977. A career educator, he also taught at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Banff School of Fine Arts, University of Lethbridge, Art’s Sake - Toronto, and Emily Carr University.

An important figure in post-war Canadian abstraction, Burton’s work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Glenbow Museum, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, as well as venerable American institutions such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Smithsonian Institute.

Source: Heffel