Jonas Burgert

Jonas Burgert - Master student of Dieter Hacker; first exhibition successes

Jonas Burgert was born in 1969 in former West Berlin. As the offspring of a family of artists, he quickly realised that a career as a painter was his destiny, but the path to this proved to be tough and arduous: after the reunification, he studied at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1991 to 1996, and in 1997 was appointed master student by his professor Dieter Hacker. As an early sign of recognition, his university granted him two scholarships and travel grants, which enabled him to study in Egypt. In 1999, Burgert developed a whole series of exhibitions in collaboration with the artist Ingolf Keiner under the name Fraktale, which took place four times until 2005, the last time in the Palace of the Republic immediately before its demolition. Despite these successes, Burgert, like many of his colleagues, experienced a decade of questions and uncertainty until he finally felt able to make a living from his art. Success came practically overnight - and brought the artist the economic security he had long longed for. 

Crazy, vulnerable and larger than life

Jonas Burgert loves and lives extremes, he can hardly think of his art without them. It is the almost insane intensity that makes his pictures so successful - and so enormous in scale, both in terms of their content and in a very literal sense. Burgert's pictures cannot be grasped in a single glance; you almost have to walk through them in order to experience them. They attract attention through their sheer size alone, as in his contribution to the long Berlin art weekend, for which he created a painting 22 metres long, 6 metres high and weighing half a tonne. This is a kind of free, intense madness with which the artist repeatedly inspires and captivates thousands of visitors, men and women of all ages, who discover his gigantomaniacal pictorial worlds with childlike curiosity and a thirst for adventure. However, the creator of the gigantic picture train is sceptical about the chances of selling it - and would not be at all unhappy if he could keep his record-breaking work himself.

Jonas Burgert sees the picture as a stage

For Jonas Burgert, his pictures are a stage; he grounds the stage set with interpenetrating ornaments; structures and symbols merge into a symbiosis, quotes from ancient, long-sunken cultures flash up and are reinterpreted. Then the figures appear, find a place for themselves, conquer the scenery, first animals, later people, whose appearance is also reminiscent of archaic tribes. Burgert loves the mysteriousness that he finds in everyday life and which he approaches in his paintings without ever resolving the enigma. His paintings tell of searching, and he leaves the finding - perhaps - to his audience. Today, Jonas Burgert lives and works mainly in Berlin, where he owns a large studio courtyard with a communal kitchen and plenty of space for visitors, especially artist friends, with whom he also devises and realises joint projects.