One Soft Thorn
An exhibition of recent drawings by Jonas Burgert
2 Front cover: beigleich Graphite on paper. 900 x 700 mm. [sheet] 2022 Photography by Lepkowski Studios
JONAS BURGERT
Although the German artist Jonas Burgert is known predominantly for intensely coloured, life-size figurative paintings, often on a very large scale, his drawings, executed in graphite on paper, reveal the intricacy of the artist’s character studies in black and white. Densely populated tableaux are how Burgert explores non-linear storytelling. Often created at the same time as these expansive pictorial dramas, the subjects of his individual portraits are exiles from the main story, isolated within their own frame. Untethered from a central narrative, they become newly enigmatic, each alluding to its own particular mysteries. Burgert is interested in the personification of psychology through figurative painting and it is his ongoing close observation of human emotion that gives his characters such a potent charge.
Jonas Burgert’s always striking, often uncanny and sometimes disturbing images are not easily forgotten. For the writer Will Self, ‘this is an art that exhibits its own struggling into being: blind, halting, bent double, always inchoate – so it is Burgert’s figures haul themselves upright; their expressions may be confused or determined, bewildered or nonplussed – but it makes no difference: they must bear the weight of this enacted negotiation, one at which the terms of endearment and alienation will be forever fixed.’
The son of a painter, Jonas Burgert was born in 1969 in Berlin, where he lives and works today. He graduated from the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts (UdK) in 1996, and the following year studied for the postgraduate title Meisterschueler, under Dieter Hacker. Active as a painter, draughtsman and sculptor, Burgert had his first one-man exhibition in Hamburg in 2006. Recent exhibitions include Bosch & Burgert at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna in 2017-2018, which placed the artist’s work alongside Hieronymous Bosch’s Last Judgement triptych of c.1482, as well as solo exhibitions at the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (MAMbo) in 2017, the ARP Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Remagen in 2020, and the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai in 2021. Paintings by Burgert are today in the collections of the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, the Hamburger Kunstalle in Hamburg and the Long Museum in Shanghai, as well as private collections in Europe, America and Asia.
The exhibition is presented in association with Southern & Partners.
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Photo: Olaf Heine
ein Dorn weich
Graphite on paper.
900 x 700 mm. [sheet]
120 x 100 x 4 cm. [frame]
2022
Wind war
Graphite on paper.
900 x 700 mm. [sheet]
120 x 100 x 4 cm. [frame]
2022
Bindsinn blind
Graphite on paper.
900 x 700 mm. [sheet]
120 x 100 x 4 cm. [frame]
2022
4
viecht
Graphite on paper.
900 x 700 mm. [sheet]
120 x 100 x 4 cm. [frame]
2022
beigleich
Graphite on paper.
900 x 700 mm. [sheet]
120 x 100 x 4 cm. [frame]
2022
Ihr Wissen
Graphite on paper.
900 x 700 mm. [sheet]
120 x 100 x 4 cm. [frame]
2022
5
sichert sich
Graphite on paper.
700 x 900 mm. [sheet]
x 120 x 4 cm. [frame]
2022
Gift später
Graphite on paper.
600 x 480 mm. [sheet] 86 x 75 x 3 cm. [frame]
2022
Wildfein
Graphite on paper.
700 x 1000 mm. [sheet] 124.5 x 95.5 x 5 cm. [frame]
2022
6
100
Anhaft
Graphite on paper.
700 x 570 mm. [sheet]
x 81 x 1.5 cm. [frame]
Los. Schuld
Graphite on paper.
x 150 mm. [sheet]
x 36.5 x 3 cm. [frame]
Atemblatt
Graphite on paper.
680 x 490 mm. [sheet]
x 73 x 2.5 cm. [frame]
7
94
2022
210
44.5
2022
92
2022
frißt und klebt
Graphite on paper.
x 600 mm. [sheet]
x 82.5 x 4 cm. [frame]
Beiblei
Graphite on paper.
x 600 mm. [sheet]
x 87 x 5.5 cm. [frame]
ihr Zug
Graphite on paper.
x 305 mm. [sheet]
x 56 x 5 cm. [frame]
8
760
97.5
2022
1000
127
2022
410
66.5
2022
glaubt
Graphite on paper.
425 x 285 mm. [sheet]
57 x 42.5 x 2.5 cm. [frame]
2022
reißt und treibt
Graphite on paper.
454 x 360 mm. [sheet]
56.5 x 47.5 x 2.5 cm. [frame]
2022
9
gleich leicht
Graphite on paper.
475 x 365 mm. [sheet]
x 60 x 5 cm [frame]
sein Echt gilt
Graphite on paper.
672 x 466 mm. [sheet]
x 105 x 2 cm. [frame]
71
2022
85
2022 10
11
Photo: Olaf Heine
Stephen Ongpin Fine Art 82 Park Street
London W1K 6NH Tel. [+44] (20) 7930-8813 e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com www.stephenongpinfineart.com
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