Inside the imaginative crucible of Berlin’s art scene, Jonas Burgert builds kingdoms that crumble as you look. He is less a painter than a conjuror—part Bosch, part Goya, with a touch of Lynch thrown in for psychological chiaroscuro. His canvases are not merely paintings, they’re cathedrals of chaos: populated by the grotesque, haunted by longing, and held together by the frayed strings of the human condition.

Graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin in 1996, and later studying under the conceptual provocateur Dieter Hacker, Burgert has forged a language all his own—a dialect of flesh, pigment, and subconscious impulse. You don’t view his work so much as you enter it, wide-eyed and unarmed.

Carnivalesque Catastrophes and Isolated Saints

Burgert’s large-scale paintings resemble frozen operas: dense with costumed mystics, skeletal prophets, and slack-jawed witnesses entangled in semi-ritualistic stasis. These aren’t scenes with beginnings or ends. They’re moments stolen from an infinite theatre of the absurd—a theatre, as the artist sees it, that defines the human impulse to mean something in an endlessly meaningless sprawl of time.

Figures appear mid-metamorphosis: a half-naked man wearing a rabbit mask sits beside a bruised child with butterfly wings; a skeletal saint offers a luminous fish to a woman made of marbled stone. Organic forms bloom and rot simultaneously. It’s a syntax of surrealism where every gesture hints at something ancient and subconscious, yet irreversibly now.

What makes Burgert especially magnetic is his refusal to tether his paintings to specific narratives. He rejects linearity and embraces the fragment. Each tableau invites interpretation but never offers answers.

I try to see what’s behind the surface.

– He once said.

That behind-ness is his true subject. Not what we are, but what we repress, disguise, or forget.

The Scale of Madness: A Brush with the Sublime

The enormity of Burgert’s works isn’t performative—it’s essential. In massive canvases like Glimpflinge (2020) and ein Klang lang (2019), bodies emerge like thoughts from a fevered dream, echoing the compositions of Renaissance altarpieces or Flemish triptychs—but contaminated by contemporary unease.

He builds these worlds using a palette that swerves from baroque lushness to bruised neon. Crimson robes, diseased yellows, corpse-blues: every color sings and screams. His smaller portraits—such as Triebe (2020) or blindstill (2019)—tighten the frame, distilling the same psychic intensity into more intimate proportions.

Burgert paints with oils, yes—but also with dread, euphoria, and the holy confusion of being alive.

A Global Theatre of Recognition

Though deeply rooted in German painting traditions, Burgert’s reach is universal. His works have traveled from Seoul to Prague, Shanghai to New York, London to Hong Kong—testifying to the emotional resonance of his strange characters and surreal stages. Whether exhibited at the Arp Museum, the Long Museum, or the Rubell Family Collection, his art transcends language and culture by speaking directly to that unevaded part of ourselves that stares blankly in the mirror when no one is watching.

He has featured in exhibitions such as Sinn frisst in Germany, Blindstich in Beijing, and Stirn sticht in Prague. Each show, regardless of location, opens new wounds and windows into his evolving mythopoetic universe. Whether through a solitary harlequin or a grotesque crowd scene, his work murmurs the same question over and over: What is this performance we call living?

Not Merely Surrealism—A Theology of the Subconscious

To label Burgert’s work as “surrealist” is too easy. His grotesqueries are not detours from reality—they are its secret infrastructure. His figures are not fantasy; they are what fantasy looks like when it gets tired of pretending. Aesthetic influence is certainly present—Bosch, Grünewald, Schiele, Bacon—but his true allegiance is to that uncomfortable thing called truth.

And truth, in Burgert’s hands, is a maddening, beautiful theatre.

Final Thoughts Without the Curtain Call

Jonas Burgert stands as a rare contemporary artist who doesn’t pander to trends or digital digestibility. His canvases, oversized and overloaded, demand time—time to look, to flinch, to wonder. They do not entertain. They envelop. They erode certainty. And in a world that insists on immediacy and clarity, that might be his greatest rebellion.

Shall we call it grotesque realism? Surreal expressionism? Perhaps. But better yet: Jonas Burgert is painting the psychological stage where we all perform, naked under layers of costume, praying for meaning in a spectacle we did not audition for.