About Us:            

You walk into an all white room. There is a beautiful woman sitting at the front desk, fashionably dressed in understated, black Prada. There are four large abstract paintings on the wall, or maybe there is a giant, metal sculpture in the center of the room made from the remains of the artist's shoe closet. The beautiful woman glances up at you and calculates your net worth in three seconds then returns to her Facebook chat. You are left alone to confront the globs of paint on the canvas while desperately attempting to put it into context. The eerie silence of the white room and the faint hostility wafting off the beautiful woman make your skin crawl. You hallucinate for a second and think you are in a postmodern presentation of "No Exit."

Welcome to the contemporary art world.

A tiny voice inside of you says, “But this is not what art should be. Why am I filled with dread and confusion when I should experience elation?"

We want to offer you something different...

Baang and Burne Contemporary aims to challenge the premise of what an art gallery is. We want to engage the world at large and present work that generates dialogue critically, socially, and culturally. We want to show you art that is "the barbaric expression of the soul" and an articulation of the world. We want to show you art that makes you feel, challenges preset notions, and cracks your consciousness open with possibilities. We are curious to know how we can facilitate art’s becoming an agent for change and use it to transform the world.

The truth of the matter is that we love art, the artists who create it and the passionate fans who eagerly want more art in their lives, but we are saddened by the creaking ruins of opulence in the art world and depressed by the excess of lavish spending. We believe selling art is only one function of a gallery and not its sole purpose. We want to liberate art from the bonds of ostentatious commoditization and transform it to the subversive cultural force it has the power to be.

Let's challenge the artists and engage the viewers. Let's empower change through collaboration.

How you ask?

In the first 16 months of Baang and Burne Contemporary’s existence, we experimented with apartment shows; private by invitation only shows; and 6x6, an art version of a music festival.
For 6x6 we presented 6 shows in 6 weeks, bringing together unexpected alliances and partnerships from various creative fields outside the art world and from non-profit arts organizations. We also tested out a roaming gallery model and a new contract wherein the artists name their own percentage of commission on sales. We learned a lot from all these experiences and now we are refining the next permutation of the gallery.

We are committed to asking challenging questions and using the gallery to continually experiment so that we may find the right solution. Baang and Burne Contemporary is designed to continually challenge and constantly innovate what art can do while evolving the purpose of art galleries to make art the agent and not merely a product.

Our Mission:  
Baang and Burne Contemporary's goal is to make art the agent and not merely a product.