Kestner Gesellschaft

JONAS BURGERT
Schutt Und Futter
22 February – 20 May 2013

In the exhibition »schutt und futter« the kestnergesellschaft presents the latest works by the painter Jonas Burgert (*1969 in West Berlin, lives in Berlin).

Jonas Burgert studied painting at the Berlin University of the Arts. His work first became known to a wider public in 2005 with the exhibition »Geschichtenerzähler« at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, and has been widely collected since then. Presentations followed in international galleries, including the Denver Art Museum, the Falkenberg Collection in the Overbeck-Gesellschaft, Lübeck, the Olbricht Collection in the Museum Folkwang, Essen, and the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. Important institutional solo exhibitions were shown at the Kunsthalle Tübingen (2010) and the Kunsthalle Krems (2011).
Jonas Burgert’s monumental paintings are opulent and richly detailed. His artistic repertoire draws on a rich fund cultural, historical and ethnological references. Fantastical figures, burlesque theatrical characters and surreal mythical beings populate his pictorial spaces. As participants in carnivalesque processions or entangled in mutual activities, they nonetheless remain isolated loners. Bandaged, naked or distorted bodies evoke feelings of insecurity. Burgert’s figures are not individuals, but correspond to more archetypal symbols of existential self-reassurance. Burgert portrays universal gestures of human expression with a wide spectrum of painterly means, and imparts an auratic power to his works. He often composes his images as box-like stages, on which he unfolds the visual wealth of his imagination. Spatial openings such as wells, chasms or windows refer to a different sphere, while the sense of space is destabilised through proportional discrepancies. The illusionistic portrayal is at times interrupted by peripheral fringes of colour, paint stains, monochrome surfaces and very diverse brushwork, and transformed into abstract, ornamental structures. Burgert’s images reflect the potential of painting to create meaning. They activate a sensuous ability to bring about spaces and atmospheres, and to mirror our existence.