Jon Burgerman’s artworks have featured at The V&A, Tate Modern and The White House, now OMNI will show his playful pop art
Artist Jon Burgerman paints and doodles. What starts out as an idea, while he is on the go, will find its way onto paper and into his computer. Once scanned, his colourful zany characters will find their way into a book, onto an armchair or a hat.
His exuberant, childlike works have made their way into the public collections of institutions such as The Science Museum, The Tate Modern and The Victoria and Albert in London. Even the walls of The White House, feature his work and his mother has the framed thank you letter from Joe Biden in her house to prove it.
Now it’s the turn of OMNI, London’s new cutting-edge art space to present the artists’ work in the UK with an arresting series of new paintings and mischievous video installations.
Allowing his imagination and process to be a driver, Jon thinks and makes at the same time. He often describes his practice as a pizza. One slice represents creating murals, paintings and works to be exhibited at galleries and museums. Another slice would be the licensing of images, so that they end up as apparel, as toys or as furniture. Additional sections would be his children’s books, creative manuals, giving talks or fun video clips created on-the-go and released to his 144,000 followers on Instagram.
With work that treads the line between fine and urban art and pop culture, his zeitgeist vision has seen him collaborate with brands including Apple, Levi’s, Samsung, Pepsi, Snapchat, Instagram, and Nike. Meanwhile, Burgerman’s wacky series of online gifs have been viewed over nine billion times.
His lightness of being could be credited to his parents, who did everything they could to make it a fun childhood for Burgerman and his two brothers. Shielded from the tragedies in his family history by his parents, his grandparents were survivors of the Nazi concentration camps of the Second World War. Jon only discovered this later when he read his grandfather’s pained words in a newspaper. Unable to speak of or revisit his trauma, towards the end of his life, his grandfather wrote about his concentration camp experience, of being the only survivor.
Burgerman’s “Jewishness”, he explains, was never an issue until he changed schools and “became the only Jew.” He explains, “This was a bit weird because there are strange things called psalms which you’ve never heard before and your parents don’t want you to sing them. So, you’re the only kid sat in a classroom, which is a bit odd.”
This sense of being the quirky oddball arguably would become his armour and trademark, along with the refusal to take himself too seriously. The sense of “goofing off”, channelled during school years to deflect serious issues with humour, has been refined to make him a sufficient force to contend with.
After his graduation from art school in Nottingham in 2001, he continued to live in the city for a decade. While working on a steady stream of design work for record labels and the likes of Levi’s and Sony, he also designed a range of vinyl toy action figures. His accessibility and cross-generational appeal caught the attention of BBC’s Blue Peter, who invited him to appear on the programme, not once but twice.
In 2010, Burgerman decided to up sticks and move to New York. His beeline was Williamsburg, Brooklyn and undeterred by his lack of musical experience, he formed a band Anxieteam with his friend, Jim Avignon. He’d never been part of a band before, nor had he written songs, yet the band managed to perform across Europe and the US, played their music on Radio 1, and were included on the cover CD of the German Rolling Stone magazine.
Burgerman and his pal continued to “goof around” until Avignon moved to Berlin. He remained, living as an Englishman in New York with his wife from Queens. Burgerman refocused on his work, doodling scenes of everyday life into picture books and works in a wide variety of different art forms, using pens Playdoh, paint, spray-paint, ink, and uses digital art and animation. During lockdown, he started painting murals that have been exhibited all over the world, including the UK, Spain, Italy, France, Taiwan, South Korea, China, and the US.
This new London exhibition, Sim City, is a wildly colourful collection of maximalist, highly saturated works in Jon’s iconic visual language. It is the artist’s belief that true success is feeling the joy in making process. Sim City showcases eight large new aerosol paintings on canvas alongside 19 works on paper and an eye-bleeding immersive video installation. Burgerman’s instantly distinctive characters feel freshly painted, and have candy-flavoured hues examine the paradoxes of contemporary life. The works suggest overpopulated urban environments, where space is at a premium and the characters vie for attention. Displaying a wide spectrum of emotions across their inhabitants, the seemingly upbeat compositions propose that despite the need for company and to be recognised, many of the forms are disconnected and even isolated.
Jon Burgerman, Sim City, 6th – 27th April OMNI, 56-57 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EG.
