ArtWall Vernissage on 3 September with Xuan Dung Burckhardt 

“Controlled uncontrollability” 

From 3 September to 10 October 2026, Xuan Dung Burckhardt will present a retrospective selection of works created between 2018 and 2026 at Centrepoint. The Vernissage is scheduled for 3 September 2026 from 18.00 to 20.00 hours.

For Burckhardt, this exhibition is an opportunity to pause. Not to stop creating, but to look back. Over eight years, a body of work has accumulated: paintings full of colour, movement, texture, chance, restraint, experimentation and instinct. Some are fluid and explosive. Others are layered, quiet, intricate or tactile. Some emerged quickly; others evolved over time. Together, they trace the development of a self-taught abstract artist who has never been interested in telling the viewer what to see. 

Burckhardt’s first exhibition, in 2018, was a solo show at Heimatmuseum Reinach. Since then, her work has moved through solo exhibitions and collaborations, from the flowing, colour-intensive canvases of her early practice to works involving relief, poetry, found materials, transparency and layers. What has remained remarkably consistent is the way she works. 

Burckhardt rarely reaches for a brush. She allows paint to pour, flow and drip across the surface – moved by a straw, a balloon, a heat gun or other unconventional tools – while remaining deeply involved in guiding its movement. Everyday objects and unexpected materials continue to enter the process, each bringing its own behaviour and possibilities. 

“I don’t usually begin with a fixed composition,” Burckhardt says. “I work intuitively. Some parts are deliberate. Others emerge through movement, chance and repetition.” She describes this balance as “controlled uncontrollability”: giving materials the freedom to behave in unexpected ways while still shaping what unfolds. 

Over time, the range of materials in her practice has expanded. Grains of rice suspended in paint catch the light and create a three-dimensional shimmer. Sand and salt transform the surface. Wire introduces lines and structures beyond the limits of paint alone. Wine glasses, a shoe and other everyday objects lose their original function and become elements of pure form. 

Another dimension of her practice emerges through collaboration. In Flowing Junction (2023), plaster panels prepared by the artist Dominik His with raw, relief-like surfaces met her paint mixtures – neither artist knowing in advance how the liquid would respond to the uneven structure. In Bild Dir Deine Meinung (2024), her paintings entered into dialogue with words she did not write herself, drawn from the poetry of Micha Schulz, creating an exchange between image and language without either directing the other. 

The most recent and perhaps most profound shift in her work appears in a series created with a Bodhi leaf from Vietnam. For the first time, the centre of the work is not only paint itself, but an organic material that already carries its own history and structure. Through a slow process, the leaf is transformed: its tissue and chlorophyll disappear until only a delicate, light-permeable network remains. Japanese newspaper fragments undergo a similar transformation, their original meaning dissolving into visual layers, traces and forms. 

This idea of transformation also touches something fundamental in Burckhardt’s relationship with those who encounter her work. Since 2019, she has deliberately stopped giving her artworks titles. “I do not want to influence how people feel, think, or interpret what they see,” she explains. “What I see as the artist does not have to be what you see. The experience should belong to you.” 

There is no correct answer. One person might see a landscape. Another, movement. Another might sense the layered newspaper fragments and feel conflict, while others might experience calm, energy, a face, a memory, or nothing recognisable at all. Burckhardt welcomes this openness. Her work invites viewers to spend time rather than arrive quickly at meaning – to look, then look again. “What is hidden is not gone,” she has said. “It is still there, waiting to be discovered.” 

Seen together, the works reveal an artistic practice driven by colour, movement, curiosity and play. Perhaps that is precisely where Burckhardt’s work finds its strength: in the space between intention and discovery, between letting go and remaining present. From the first drop of paint to the last leaf, Burckhardt’s work lives within a contradiction that is not really a contradiction at all: the art of surrendering control without ever fully losing it. 

Xuan Dung Burckhardt’s retrospective exhibition will be shown at Centrepoint, Im Lohnhof 8, Basel, from 3 September to 10 October 2026. The Vernissage takes place on 3 September. For more information:  www.xdart.ch