Lot 26 D

With its rich personnel and multi-layered spatial situations, the large-format second painting from the ‘Bergung’ work group - the first of which is also offered in this auction as lot 27 – offers a stage-like scenery that is characteristic of Jonas Burgert’s oeuvre.
"Burgert’s characteristic figurative pictorial language appears in the tradition of great world theater, whereby the ‘director’, Burgert, seems to prefer tragedy over comedy in his role as the painting demiurge. His actors, who operate in distorted dimensions, undeviatingly pursue an apparently ritualized activity that is devoid of meaning; one or the other pensive protagonist, perhaps for reason of lethargy, retreats to the status of the observer. An indolent placidness dominates the setting; an atmosphere of coolness and at the same time subdued aggressions hangs in the air. […] With the creation of unknown spaces in pictorial space, which point almost like black holes toward a fourth dimension, paths lead into the abyss of nothing. […] Yet the goal the stoic, drifting actors are pursuing, the story that is supposed to be being told here, remains uncertain. One feels one has been abducted into a surreal fantasy world, believes oneself to be in a floating, dream-like state in which everything is engulfed in a feeling of lost utopia.” (Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Das gemalte Welttheater des Jonas Burgert, in: Jonas Burgert. Lebendversuch, exhib.cat. Kunsthalle Tubingen/Kunsthalle Krems 2010/2011, p.77 f.)