ANDREW RAFACZ is thrilled to announce Thumb Piano, a solo exhibition of new works from Robert Burnier, in Gallery Two. The exhibition opens Friday, September 12th and continues through Saturday, November 1st, 2025.

For his sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, Burnier presents a new series of colored pencil and graphite on folded gampi paper works. Referencing his observations and experiences of the landscapes and urban spaces from his recent travels, they reflect a similar approach to material and composition as the artist’s more widely seen aluminum sculptures.

Burnier recalls, ‘traveling through Europe and Africa compelled me to turn to drawing as portable and responsive. Oslo, Florence, Cape Town. Each has its rhythm of space and color. Where I stood made me think about history in proximity to that impression: how the 70,000-year-old ochre of Blombos Cave echoes in the architectural washes of Florence, or how the Table Mountain dawn inspired both a beautiful solidarity and a tragic oppression. Color as motive, as attitude, its shifting perception and mood setting the stage for our lifeworlds.’

Utilizing a palette of cool oceanic blues, deep greens, fiery reds and incandescent oranges, Burnier’s drawings capture a wide bandwidth of light and form. The exhibition also includes a single aluminum wall work, Horuso II (2022), which was previously exhibited at blank projects in Cape Town and has not been seen in Chicago. Ribbon-like, expansive, and bounding a large gulf of negative space, it is a particularly poignant foil to his new compact drawings.

The exhibition’s title references the mbira, the traditional handheld Zimbabwean instrument that figured prominently in anti-colonial music movements and was later adopted by musicians such as Philip Cohran, Thomas Mapfumo, and Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire, who brought its sound into jazz, pop, R&B, and disco. For Burnier, the thumb piano— with its small stature, portability and ‘understated but alluring power’— is an analog to this part of his practice.

The gallery will release a bifold publication on the artist, with an essay by Daria Harper, during Chicago Exhibition Weekend, September 21-23, 2025.

ROBERT BURNIER (American, b. 1969) lives and works in Chicago, IL. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2016 and his BS in Computer Science from the Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania in 1991. He has been a resident at the Ragdale Foundation for the Arts, and recently received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2025. Solo exhibitions include ANDREW RAFACZ (Chicago, IL), Corvi-Mora (London, UK), blank projects (Cape Town, SA), Massey Klein Gallery (New York, NY), David B. Smith Gallery (Denver, CO), and The Arts Club of Chicago (Chicago, IL). Group exhibitions include the Astrup Fearnly Museum (Oslo, Norway), Schneider Museum of Art (Ashland, OR), Secrist Beach (Chicago, IL), Brintz + County (Palm Beach, FL), ANDREW RAFACZ (Chicago, IL), New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art at the University of Southern Indiana (Evansville, IN), Corvi-Mora (London, UK), Vacation (New York, NY), Korn Gallery at Drew University (Madison, NJ), The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), and Elmhurst Art Museum (Elmhurst, IL). Burnier’s large-scale installation Black Tiberinus was on view on Chicago’s riverfront in 2018 and 2019. He has exhibited at art fairs in Chicago, Copenhagen, London, Mexico City, Milan, Miami, New York, and Toronto. His work has been written about in many publications, including Chicago Tribune, Art Forum, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, and Artnet. Burnier currently holds the position of Assistant Professor in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is included in numerous public and private collections.