Bonnie and Clyde, also known as Steph Burnley, is a contemporary British artist based in Brighton, UK. Her work in primarily mixed media collage exploring scenes of the urban imaginary incorporating painting and print techniques. Bonnie and Clyde's art immerses the viewer in beautiful and bizarre cityscapes through a combination of photography, collage, texture and paint, depicting the psychogeography of the metropolis.
Burnley studied 3D design at Kingston University before setting up her own graphic design business in Manchester, where she created a wide range of designs, including posters, brochures, book sleeves, illustrations, logos, websites, signage, and festival campaigns. She later worked in urban fashion and as a photographer for various music and culture magazines before moving to Brighton and focusing on screen-printing, which became the cornerstone of her distinctive, collage aesthetic.
In the development of her aesthetic, music and film, signage, iconography, architecture, street photography, and the coast appear as central, recurring tropes. With a sensitivity to the relationship between the built environment and the natural landscape, Bonnie and Clyde's work offers a space to explore human interaction in urban sites, with a focus on the delicate association of the socio-political and the deeply personal journey of meditation and the study of human potential.
Bonnie and Clyde's imagined scenes draw inspiration from a wide range of locations, with the iconic topography of California, from the vibrant architecture of Santa Monica to rows of palm trees at Venice Beach, featuring heavily in her work. Burnley's jet-setter spirit is reflected in the host of other urban centres, including Tokyo, London, Venice and Havana, that have also appeared across her oeuvre. Her passion for twentieth-century architecture, from modernism to brutalism, to post-modernism and beyond, suffuses the overall aesthetic.
Bonnie and Clyde is now focused on painting and 3D works alongside her print practice, which are created through a combination of digital and tactile processes on canvas and wood panels. She uses self-taken photographs, along with painted areas , 3D elements, and printed matter, to represent the beautiful, messy, vibrant, and chaotic nature of life in the city. Her abstracted pieces tell a dizzying, non-linear narrative of the individual, navigating the dualistic city, which is always banal as well as beautiful, terrifying while magnetic.
Bonnie and Clyde's notable exhibitions include solo shows at 45 Park Lane (London) curated by Ackerman Studios in association with Liberty Gallery, Lilford Gallery (Canterbury), Lawrence Alkin Gallery (London), and 'Subterraneans', a Beat Culture curated exhibition at Leeds College of Art. Her work has also been shown alongside artists such as Kim Gordon, Yoko Ono, and Gavin Turk. Bonnie and Clyde currently exhibits with a number of galleries across the country, including The Drang, Hicks Gallery, For Arts Sake, and Enter Gallery amongst others. She also sells at art fairs inn the UK and nternationally with Liberty Gallery and has completed a number of large-scale commissions, including a 5m x 1m piece for Barbie Green and a 4.5-meter by 2.5-meter 2D/ 3D piece for Paradise Green, 100 Bishopsgate London, along with a triptych and multiple panel pieces for various art advisors, architects and interior designers in London and Brighton, all printed and collaged on wood panels, working with Harwood King Fine Art Printers. She recently completed a set of 5 large archive inspired pieces for 5 floors for the new London 130,000sq ft HQ of global investment management firm T Rowe Price in Paternoster Square, working with art curators Jill Sheridan and ‘In Situ’.
