Dennis Burton

Dennis Burton (December 6, 1933 – July 8, 2013) was a Canadian modernist painter.

Biography Burton was born and grew up in Lethbridge, Alberta, but won a scholarship to Pickering College in Newmarket, afterwards attending the Ontario College of Art (OCAD), studying with Jock Macdonald and Fred Hagan (1952-1956). He had further training at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, with Rico Lebrun, 1955 and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, 1959 with Ben Shahn. Burton later worked as a graphic designer for the Canadian Broadcasting Company until 1960 when he began painting full-time.

An exhibition in 1955 of Painters Eleven at Toronto's Hart House (today the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Art Museum at the University of Toronto) which he visited with his friend, artist Gordon Rayner, turned him towards abstraction. But it was their subsequent visit to the Albright Knox Museum in Buffalo NY (now called the Buffalo AKG Art Museum), where they first saw the American abstractionists: Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Clyfford Still and others, that really turned them around, and on returning to Toronto both Burton and Rayner painted their first abstract paintings. Under the influence of the neo-Dada movement current in Toronto in the late 1950s and first half of the 1960s, Burton began to create sculpture using scrap metal and found materials welded together.

He showed his work with Toronto's Isaacs Gallery (1961, 1962, 1965). These works made politician John Diefenbaker denounce Dennis Burton in the House of Commons, coining the term "garter belt-maniac". But both before and after these works, he created large abstractions that might involve using different creative strategies involving language, colour and form. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa Smithsonian Institution, Washington Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge Vancouver Art Gallery Walker Art Center, Minneapolis