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.