An artist and the author of seminal essays on photography and on the theory of art, since the late sixties Burgin has been developing his artistic research, constantly moving between practice and theoretical reflections.

This “third space” (H. Bhabha, 1991), which is the place and outcome of this alternation, has become the deliberately ambiguous, ever-shifting foundation of his work. On each occasion it may appear in the pages of a book or in a gallery space, and it is much more than a simple act of perception by the viewer.

From this perspective, his preferred medium, photography, has acquired various meanings: it has powerfully corroded modernist autonomy, and has also made it possible to recreate a link with the real world and to abandon the analytical logic of many conceptual practices.

But whether as a form of appropriation or the hijacking of advertising images in his early works, or even the representation of sexual roles in the history of art and in the media, Burgin’s work has also been influenced by his studies of semiotics, cinema and psychoanalysis. He has investigated and decoded “the agency of the image” in defining the predominant terms of representation.

More recently, Burgin has directed his verbal-visual discourse towards architecture and the space of the psyche, which is to say the power and impact of architecture in shaping the world and our unconscious imagination.

Invited by Lia Rumma to create a work especially for Milan, Burgin has designed The Ideal City, in which the title is an explicit reference to the Renaissance painting now in the Ducal Palace in Urbino. It is a symbol of the ideal city governed by geometric discipline and perspective, but also where the fascinating mental associations generated by the image lead all the way to the elegant but alienating sequences in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, La Notte.