Burden studied at the Universiry of California between 1969 and 1971. Starting in 1978 the artist taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and became Professor of Art at the University of California in Los Angeles and the same year.
A central theme of Chris Burdens art is the visualisation of energies and forces as both physical-technical and societal phenomena. With extraordinarily ambitious and large sculptures and installations he frequently pushed the envelope of feasibility to encapsulate his visions convincingly and unambiguously, either in the form of models (e.g. all submarines of the US Navy as paper models) or in 1:1 scale (fortifications).
