But it was their visit to the Albright Knox Museum in Buffalo NY (now called the Buffalo AKG Art Museum), where they first saw the American abstractionists: Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Clyfford Still and others, that really turned them around, and on returning to Toronto both Burton and Rayner painted their first abstract paintings.
[4][5] Under the influence of the neo-Dada movement current in Toronto in the late 1950s and first half of the 1960s, Burton began to create sculpture using scrap metal and found materials welded together.
[2][3] For this reason, he has been called part of the Isaacs Group of artists, which include, among others, Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, John Meredith and Graham Coughtry.
[3][6] He is best known for the Garterbeltmania works of females in their underwear which he showed with the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa in his retrospective in 1977.
[7] These works made politician John Diefenbaker denounce Dennis Burton in the House of Commons, coining the term "garter belt-maniac".