Every day a little trick to get rid of the boring life
In April, British artist Jon Burgerman's solo exhibition "New Friends" was featured at the WOAW Gallery in Hong Kong. As one of the most high-profile rising stars in today's trendy art world, Jon's work has been exhibited in museums, galleries and even the White House around the world, and he has become a popular object of invitations for major brands to collaborate.
Jon Burgerman “New Friends” 个展
When it comes to Jon, his rounded, humorous, colorful spots painted with various expressions seem to have a hallucinogenic magic that makes people exclaim cute and loveable at the same time, but also unforgettable. He refers to these works, which have no obvious sense of boundaries, "Fuzzy Paints."
In a speech, he said he enjoyed the process of creating these paintings, "Everything (spots) become soft and blurred, that's what I like." This also gives my work a different character. "In addition to speckled spots, Jon can come up with all kinds of strange ideas, pick up trivialities, and turn the ordinary into fun. He once said that what he created was not art, but just wanted every ordinary person to participate in it, play with their imaginations, and have fun.
Everybody Has A Body by Jon Burgerman
Home isolation is also creative
Jon Burgerman's "Fuzzy Paints" (Fuzzy Paints) began in early 2020 during the COVID-19 outbreak. Isolated at home, he stumbled upon a box of watercolors and some scraps of paper left over, and bored, he tried to draw colorful dots on the paper and watch them seep out in a kaleidoscopic way. When the paper was covered with these inexplicable spots, Jon made a clever move to try to add a vivid expression to it. When he saw the final effect of the drawing paper, he suddenly realized: it felt right.
Jon Burgerman
Jon is such a playful, childlike person, he always observes the world and creates like a child. Although his paintings seem very simple at first glance, the playfulness and sincerity of his flow have still won the attention and recognition of many adults. In addition to giving people intuitive visual pleasure, Jon hopes to help people alleviate their inner anxiety through creation, share the energy of happiness with people during the epidemic, and bring creative inspiration.
Jon Burgerman
He shows in his paintings the isolation, anxiety, and desire for freedom he felt during the quarantine, "I take things that are less serious. "We can see the speckled expression under his brush, from fake smile, sadness, embarrassment to anger... It has it all, and sometimes the corners of the mouth or corners of the eyes with these colored dots will even flow down strings of slightly frightening liquids. In the contrast of bright and bright tones, we can see a complex contradiction hidden within it.
Jon Burgerman
Jon once quoted writer Kurt Vonnegut as describing his mood when drawing these spots, "He was a clumsy man who only felt beautiful when swimming. He was effortless in the water, and by then he was no longer himself. But drawing the same thing over and over again made Jon gradually feel that things were far less interesting than they were. Therefore, he constantly tries to fuse his spots with various real objects, colliding with new sparks, such as candies, bananas, dolls, hamburgers...
Jon Burgerman
"We've all been a mess"
It was because of his skepticism about repetitive creation that Jon began to explore digital art, using NFTs to sell his work. In 2021, he created the digital series "Blobs" of Fuzzy Paintings. In three-dimensional space, those flat spots show another kind of vitality: they swim freely in a dark universe without boundaries, intersecting and dispersing, and the colors change alternately at all times; the edges of their bodies sway up and down with the rhythm of breathing, and their expressions are constantly distorted...
Jon Burgerman “Blobs”
Each of Jon's NFT images has a different background music. Because he wanted to combine the work with the music and present it together as a whole, "like the work of art I heard in my dreams." Each scene in Jon's dream is accompanied by a different musical background, beautiful and eerie. Even when he wakes up, the melody of the dream will always haunt his mind. Therefore, he decided to create a unique bgm for each dynamic painting.
Jon Burgerman “Blobs”
From October to December 2021, Porsche partnered with the emerging gallery K NIG to transform electronic screens in the busiest commercial squares in New York, Madrid, Berlin, Seoul and Tokyo into a temporary art display space, where Jon's work is on display. Jon argues that the crowds of people in the heart of the city, along with the bustling color spots on electronic screens, form an interesting space that reflects multiple metaphors.
Jon Burgerman
If you look down on the earth, different people actually present different shapes, sizes and colors, like everything in his paintings. In his work "Blobs", he makes a similar interpretation:
"Blobs are soft jelly: they're sticky, slippery, moist, floating plankton; they're phosphorus rainbow sperm swimming for life, they're commuting to work on the subway, through the streets of Shibuya. Blobs are individuals, syrupy, egg yolk-flowing lives; blobs are just ordinary people, we've all been a mess. ”
Jon Burgerman “Blobs”
In February, Jon launched a unique NFT Pizza Shop that sells 6,666 pizzas he makes. Interestingly, pizza was created around 11 specific themes: diamonds, England, New York, rainbows, burgers, pizza, death, bites, neon lights, flames and gold, and he created six special pizzas according to each theme. After collecting six pieces of the same theme and crafting a brand new whole pizza, the purchaser can request a physical pizza that he personally draws.
Jon Burgerman
As one of Jon's favorite foods, pizza has so many advantages he had to paint. Its form is simple and varied: round, triangular, square, and the toppings on the surface can be added as much as they want, "In New York, every community has its own idea of pizza. In his eyes, pizza is everywhere, all over the world, and each culture has its own special pizza. It is a casual, otherworldly but grounded emotional enhancer.
Jon Burgerman
At 31, he started all over again in New York
Born in the middle of England in 1979, Jon graduated from Nottingham Trent University in 2001. In 2010, at the age of 31, he was already a well-known artist when he left the UK for New York, publishing up to 300 pages of his monograph. But he decided to travel far and wide to New York in search of a new direction, where "there is a powerful aura where everyone is sure they can do something." ”
Jon Burgerman
He arrived in New York with only two suitcases, facing the dilemma of having nowhere to live. But soon, he adapted to local life and formed the duo band Anxieteam with another artist, Jim Avignon. Their songs are simple and light, With Jim arranging and Jon writing the lyrics, "I want the lyrics to be fun and make people sketch beautiful images in their minds." They also put their cartoon-style pieces on a small performance stage as fun props. But soon the band disappeared.
Anxieteam
Jon's first-time work in the United States continues its large mural graffiti form from his time in England. He once classified himself as a graffiti, but since then, he has said that his creation is much more complex than people's established impressions of "graffiti", and the whole process is full of changes, thinking and creating in parallel. When creating, he attaches great importance to the interaction with the audience, so he often draws black and white manuscripts, and the remaining colors are left to the audience.
Jon Burgerman
In 2014, when the Whitney Museum exhibited Jeff Koons's "Play-Doh," Jon made a batch of palm-sized miniature "Play-Dohs" out of real plasticine and sold them standing in front of the museum. Unlike Jeff Koons's giant 3-meter-tall aluminum work, which took twenty years to complete, Jon's work took only twenty seconds to complete. He packed each sculpture in a transparent box with a certificate of authenticity. These small objects have also won the love and smile of many visitors.
Jon Burgerman “Play-Doh”
In 2016, he copied the famous work "Artist Presence" by artist Marina Abramovich. In an appeal to world peace, Abramovich spent more than 700 hours at MoMA in a face-to-face silent exchange with 1,500 strangers.
In his work Selfless Selfie, Jon borrows from this form. He invited different people to sit across from him and quickly paint portraits of each other in a 60-second limited-time meeting. Because the time is too short, the first impression of each other is intuitively presented on the paper. Since then, different portraits of Jon have also been displayed on a wall, and he has even taken pictures with countless of himself.
Jon Burgerman “Selfless Selfie”
Street wildlife watcher
During the pandemic, when people are staying at home, Jon often wanders the streets of New York alone. After taking pictures of the empty streets, he combined the pictures with the plasticine animals he had pinched before, so that the deserted streets were no longer deserted: a giant snail protruded from behind a building; a black cat lazily basking in the sun, its body occupying the entire roof; a starfish that had just crawled out of the sea, standing conspicuously on the beach, curiously looking around...
Jon Burgerman
Since then, his creative inspiration for the streets has been out of control. Whenever he saw something interesting, he would use Instagram Stories to snap a video or photo and add some funny doodles to it. The most impressive thing is that he has painted a pair of eyes for many things: so, a box of cucumbers on the supermarket shelves has a fluttering look, as if they are looking at people passing by; two trash cans that are in love shyly close their eyes; different grab rings on the bus, some become dizzy due to bumps, some are curiously looking at the scenery outside the window, and some are overworked, and their eyes are covered with red blood...
instagram fom Jon Burgerman
Jon's antics are also vividly reflected in the series "Face Changing Video", where he photographs strangers on the New York subway and mischievously replaces their faces with their own, forming a weird "Jon Universe". In 2018, because he thought those jagged urban graffiti was another form of visual noise, he invented a way to graffiti on the streets with chalk, which he called "polite graffiti."
Jon Burgerman “Polite Graffiti“
In his work "Headshots" of the same year, he unusually and solemnly expressed his reflection on the spread of violence. Under the various movie posters of the New York subway station that reveal guns, he acts as a model, through the way of field shooting and then adding post-production, showing the heroic protagonist under the gun, those who have been ignored and bloodied victims.
Jon Burgerman “Headshots”
In addition to his personal creations, Jon published the Creative Sharing book It's Great To Create in 2017. In the book, he shares 101 interesting creative methods for people, such as painting with a mask, painting on the face with seasonings, digging some interesting holes in the paper...
Jon BurgermanIt's Great To Create
Jon has said that whenever he encounters something new, he becomes extremely excited. Talking about his next creative plans, he hopes to turn a small sausage in his graffiti into a giant balloon installation to parade through the streets of New York; another plan is to create a full-length animation.
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What's the funniest thing you've ever painted?
Written by/Xiao Liu
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/ Kuding tea
Typography/Koko
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