Jonas Burgert, a German painter from Berlin, is a rising star in the contemporary art world, and his first solo exhibition in the United States, “Enigmatic Narrative,” is currently on view in the Victoria H. Myhren Gallery.
The exhibit consists of six large-scale paintings and one pencil drawing on paper. Burgert has a small studio set up in the gallery where he works during his seven-week residency at DU.
Burgert will be in residence until Nov. 20, and the exhibit is open and free to the public through Nov. 23. The gallery is open noon to 4 p.m. daily.
Christoph Heinrich, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum, noticed Burgert’s talent and brought his most recent piece, Temple, to Denver. It is now on display at the museum. When Dan Jacobs, the director of the Myhren Gallery, heard about Burgert being in Denver, he pursued the opportunity of hosting Burgert at DU.
Burgert spoke Wednesday to about 80 students and faculty.
“We have all these things coming to our brains and I’m interested in what are the fundamental things, what remains,” said Burgert. “What I’m doing is to be very honest, to show it how I feel it.”
The largest painting in the gallery is Dust, Pride, and Nothingness, 2007. It depicts a group of individuals with neon-colored body paint following a young child in a bleak colored warehouse. The painting stands from the ceiling to the floor, and the figures are unrecognizable.Burgert said he does not paint specific people but rather figures that are symbols for all of humanity.
“I like that you don’t know the final result because that’s life,” Burgert said. “A painting must be a symbol for something not the whole story.” In Dust, Pride, and Nothingness the figures enter from a door at the back of the room, but it is visually unclear where they have just come from and where they are going.
Burgert emphasized that the most important element of painting is to convey a feeling or sensation. He strives to evoke an atmosphere. Details are secondary, said Burgert.
Noisy Wins, 2007 evokes the feeling of destruction. A wall in shambles zigzags down the center of the painting and all the figures wear blank expressions.
“It’s about going there to play a game,” said Burgert. One of the figures holds a board that resembles a checker board and the perspective is slightly that of a bird’s eye view to suggest looking down at a board game. Symbols and perspective help to communicate Burgert’s theme.
The painting of a boy sitting on a bed, Petty Perpetrator, illustrates the struggle with a second personality. A second boy on stilts made of tree branches stands over the bed and behind the boy.
“I never had such strange ideas and dreams as when I was a boy,” said Burgert about the inspiration for this piece.
The leaves on the branches are unnaturally bright green and are a symbol of energy. In his paintings, Burgert combines natural colors with radioactive-looking colors.
“I like this contrast, like a poison of our time but through the color,” said Burgert.
Another reoccurring element in the paintings is skeletons. Although the depiction of skeletons in some of his pieces creates a morbid and dark atmosphere, Burgert described death as energy. Death is all around, death is inevitable, but death can push us to do something before we die, Burgert said. Burgert sometimes paints animals or an element of nature into his paintings that often seem industrial because of city landscapes or pieces of infrastructure dominant in the picture.
“We are all involved with nature,” said Burgert. He rode a horse for the first time during his stay in Denver and said the Rocky Mountains are beautiful.
“The process of doing this is so sensitive and strange,” said Burgert about the creative process. “You have to be sensitive and then strong. When you are safe you are making boring art. You have to be brave to do it for years.”
