작품 상세

Luft schleift leicht, 2018 Oil on canvas 157.5 x 110.25 in (400 x 280 cm) Jonas Burgert B. 1969, West Berlin, Germany “It is a human duty to feel responsible for our planet.” - Jonas Burgert Jonas Burgert paints to capture the drama and surrealism of everyday life. Using the collision of darkness and light, human and animal, reality and fantasy, his figurative works are intent on tackling the world’s pressing, existential questions and humanity’s desire to find meaning in our existence beyond physicality. Burgert examines human nature, our reasoning, our imagination, and our need to find assured answers – a quest that ultimately is endless. Luft schleift leicht studies the balance between the Earthly and spiritual planes. The combination of bodies, both human and animal, mirror the connection between all living beings in physical and fictional worlds with strong art historical references to Renaissance painting and Flemish masters like Hieronymus Bosch. There are prehistoric fowls and zebras, ghouls and harlequins, Amazons, children, and sometimes the painter himself, all struggling to capture humanity’s vulnerability in an ever-reincarnated theatre performance of colour and form, of fantasy and dream. Each figure plays an essential role within the composition, precluding one central character from emerging. The grid and large scale used in early Renaissance perspective painting is still visible and guides the eye down a linear narrative through an ecologically disastrous ‘lifetime’. Surrounded by thick brushstrokes of impasto, the mass of beings is again reminiscent of the compositional complexity of a Renaissance painting, while the psychoanalytic overtones of the canvas situate the work within the unconscious worlds of the Surrealists, with a Freudian whirlwind of libido and cessation. The timeless absurdity inherent within the painting becomes personal for each individual viewer. We are guided through a story of fragmented scenes, that the viewer thinks to recognize because they tap into the unconscious by combining styles of the past with a fiction of today. Burgert’s oeuvre is grounded in intimacy, distinctly human, and therefore unwaveringly vulnerable in a manner that touches us all. Courtesy of the artist and Blain|Southern Gallery Fair Market Value: $410,000