Sean Burns

United Kingdom

Assistant Editor at Frieze

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Articles

‘Local Communities Are a Priority’: Ann Gallagher on Launching Goodwood Art Foundation

1 week ago | frieze.com | Sean Burns |Ann Gallagher

Frieze PublishingYes, email me reviews, offers, and opinions by artists, writers, and editors from Frieze Frieze EventsYes, email me Frieze Events Inc and Frieze Events Ltd’s global programme information including special offers and benefits Sean Burns After your influential tenure at Tate, what drew you to the Goodwood Art Foundation, and what excites you most about its potential?
Venice Biennale: Can Architecture Rescue the Future?

1 month ago | frieze.com | Sean Burns

A sign about two-thirds of the way around the Arsenale reads: ‘We are fucked! You can change it!’ The statement by HouseEurope! responds to curator Carlo Ratti’s emphatic call to engage with urgent environmental issues in his exhibition for the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, ‘Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.’ His show features more than 750 participants, from farmers to fashion designers, and over 280 projects spread throughout the Arsenale and across the city.
Editor’s Picks: The Defiance of Novelist Edna O’Brien

2 months ago | frieze.com | Sean Burns

Frieze Editor’s Picks is a fortnightly column in which a frieze editor shares their recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to. Sinéad O’Shea, Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story (2025) In the opening minutes of Sinéad O’Shea’s Blue Road (2025), a new documentary about Edna O’Brien, the celebrated writer’s gentle west-of-Ireland voice murmurs over footage of her younger self: ‘I was born with this ability and demon to write.
The Joyful Vision of David Hockney

2 months ago | frieze.com | Sean Burns

After a lifetime of gallivanting between London, Los Angeles and his hometown of Bridlington in the north of England, David Hockney found himself spending the COVID-19 lockdown in his farmhouse in the small Normandy village of Beuvron-en-Auge. To pass the hours of isolation, he began producing a series of landscapes on his iPad – an at-hand device he has been using since 2010 for observational drawings.
A Conversation About Queerness in the Baltics: ‘We Felt Compelled to Tackle These Issues’

Dec 10, 2024 | echogonewrong.com | Sean Burns

Queer Histories from the Baltic Region presented innovative research on queer cultures and artistic practices, highlighting the rich history of gender and sexuality discourses in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The programme – held at Auto Italia in London and the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2024 – aimed to broaden the understanding of the conditions faced by queer-identifying individuals in the region.
Editor’s Picks: The Cure’s Lament for Collective Grief

Oct 27, 2024 | frieze.com | Sean Burns

Frieze Editor’s Picks is a fortnightly column in which a frieze editor shares their recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to. The Cure, Songs of a Lost World, 2024 Like ‘Plainsong’ (1989) before it, ‘Alone’, the opening track from Songs of a Lost World (2024), The Cure’s first album in 16 years, is so sumptuous that singer Robert Smith doesn’t feel the need to utter a word until halfway in.
The Unsettling Presence of Francis Bacon

Oct 13, 2024 | frieze.com | Sean Burns

Francis Bacon’s beady eyes – the first thing visitors encounter in this comprehensive survey of the artist’s portraiture at London’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) – exert an influence that permeates the entire exhibition. The painter, then aged 59, stares out like an inquisitive bird in a clip from Peter Gidal’s black and white film Heads (1969). Here is an artist seemingly aware of his self-image and myth, sitting for an intimate filmic portrait so close-cropped you can’t see his ears.
Marlene Dumas Speaks Truth to Power

Aug 15, 2024 | frieze.com | Sean Burns

In Gallery 17 of the Louvre Museum in Paris, there is a carved marble sculpture of a naked elderly man sprawled against a tree, his hands tied at the wrists, his feet barely reaching the ground. His deeply wrinkled face slumps between two stretched, sinewy arms, while his mouth forms a defeated grimace, as though the situation in which he finds himself – bound to a pine trunk – is inevitable. With his eyes downcast, he might already be dead.
Paris Dispatch: Art has a Sporting Chance at the Olympics

Jul 18, 2024 | frieze.com | Sean Burns

This week, the 2024 Summer Olympic Games opens in Paris with a ceremony containing a flotilla ferrying 10,500 athletes and delegates down the Seine in a celebration of all things sports. It will be the first time an Olympic ceremony has taken place outside of a stadium, and it aims to attract a larger audience closer to the action. I’ve heard a rumour that the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, and unpopular president, Emmanuel Macron, will literally be in the river.
The Quiet Drama of Yunchul Kim’s Kinetic Sculptures

Jun 27, 2024 | frieze.com | Sean Burns

A knot-shaped trail of oil stains the grey concrete floor in the centre of 798CUBE Art Museum. Formed from dripping grease, which lubricates the mechanisms of an enormous, hanging sculpture above, it is the shadowy footprint of Yunchul Kim’s CHROMA IX (2024), a serpentine marvel of engineering that gently pulsates with an unnerving life of its own.