Jonas Burgert (b. 1969)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more
Jonas Burgert (b. 1969)

Suchtpuls / Addicted to Pulse

Details
Jonas Burgert (b. 1969)
Suchtpuls / Addicted to Pulse
signed and dated 'Jonas Burgert 2011' (on the reverse of each part)
oil on canvas, in three parts
each: 157 ½ x 90 ½in. (400 x 230cm.)
overall: 157 ½ x 271 5/8in. (400 x 690cm.)
Painted in 2011
Provenance
Blain Southern, Berlin.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.
Exhibited
Berlin, Blain Southern, Jonas Burgert Gift gegen Zeit, 2012.
Hannover, Kestnergesellschaft, Jonas Burgert Schutt und Futter, 2013, p. 144, no. 16 (illustrated in colour, pp. 74-75).
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.

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Tessa Lord
Tessa Lord

Lot Essay

A crowd of cacophonous figures swarm, pose and collapse in Jonas Burgert’s monumental Suchtplus, 2011, a visually complex and multi-layered tumult of jostling form. The painting was included in the artist’s 2013 solo exhibition Schutt und Futter at Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover. Burgert’s improbable colours and characters are brilliantly luminous: a pink cow, periwinkle fabric that flows like water, brilliant green robes, electric yellow poles whose juncture tents a dangling knot of magenta men. Compositionally engulfing, Suchtplus is a riveting spectacle and like a stage, the painting encourages its theatrical beings and monsters to perform. The visceral qualities of the painting owe much to Burgert’s fascination with psychology and the ways in which a person’s interior self must reckon with the external world. ‘My interest,’ he said, ‘is directed principally toward the phenomenon of the human being, the problematic of his self-definition. The human being doesn’t know what a human being is. We do not have any standard map; we have to redetermine our coordinates again and again. In this self-reflection, we are permanently searching. For we are not simply instinctive beings. The ensuing uncertainty leads to a need to embed ourselves. We disguise ourselves, subordinate ourselves to a culture, a ceremony, a rite, a fashion, a religion. I don’t know how many thousands of gods human beings have invented in order to discover themselves therein. Unlike animals, human beings argue with their existence, their definition. I am interested in this phenomenon’ (J. Burgert quoted in H. Dietz, ‘Rubble and Fodder’, https://www.jonasburgert.de/2016/02/17/heinrich-dietz-rubble-and-fodder/#more-271).

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