Jonas Burgert

Jonas Burgert was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1969. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin (now the Berlin University of the Arts, UdK Berlin), graduating in 1996, and went on to complete a postgraduate Meisterschuler title under Professor Dieter Hacker in Berlin. He lives and works in Berlin.

Burgert gained international visibility when he was included in Charles Saatchi's Triumph of Painting Part VI at the Saatchi Gallery, London, in 2006. One of his early US museum exhibitions, Enigmatic Narrative, opened at the Vicki H. Myhren Gallery at the University of Denver in 2008, coinciding with the acquisition of his work by the Denver Art Museum. Through the following decade he continued to exhibit with galleries including Blain Southern in Berlin and London. His 2017 solo show at MAMbo, the Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, was cited by Apollo magazine as a highlight of that year's exhibitions, and the same year the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver invited him to curate a selection from its collection for its Artists Select series.

Blain Southern, his longtime gallery in Berlin and London, closed in 2020. Burgert's primary representation has since consolidated around Tang Contemporary Art, which has staged solo exhibitions with him in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Seoul, and Produzentengalerie Hamburg, which continues to present his work in Germany and at European art fairs. In 2021 the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai presented bluht und lugt, described by the museum as his inaugural solo museum exhibition in Asia. Recent solo exhibitions include sinnwild at Tang Contemporary Art, Seoul, in 2024 and Kein Einst at Produzentengalerie Hamburg in 2025.

Critical and curatorial attention to Burgert has centered on how his large, crowded canvases function as staged, allegorical theater rather than as depictions of individual people. Christoph Heinrich, then curator at the Denver Art Museum, described the spaces in his paintings as theatrical settings built from metaphoric parables, in which figures function as allegories for human existence rather than as individual portraits (Vicki H. Myhren Gallery, University of Denver, 2008). His 2017 exhibition at MAMbo in Bologna was singled out by Apollo magazine as one of the year's notable shows. Institutional recognition has come largely through exhibitions and collection holdings and through the Clyfford Still Museum's invitation for him to curate from its permanent collection, rather than through named art prizes; no verifiable record of formal awards for Burgert was found in the sources consulted.

Burgert's auction market is thin and spans a small number of European and international houses. The highest documented results include Tauschung, which sold for EUR 151,200 including premium at Lempertz in Cologne, and Zartbleib, which sold for USD 151,200 at Phillips; exact sale dates are not shown in the accessible records for either work, and available sources do not establish which of the two is the higher or more recent result. Other notable results include Hundstand at USD 131,000 and schwindet und flieht at USD 94,500, both at Phillips, Zyklus-Potsdam (Teil II) at EUR 124,000 and Potsdam-Zyklus Teil I (5) at EUR 99,200, both at Lempertz, and Verfechter at EUR 137,500 including surcharge at Ketterer Kunst. No source consulted provides a comprehensive, cross-house, currency-adjusted ranking, so these figures should be read as the highest documented results available rather than a confirmed all-time auction record.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Burgert and no documented certificate-of-authenticity program, so provenance and verification generally run through his current representing galleries, Tang Contemporary Art and Produzentengalerie Hamburg; earlier works may also trace to Blain Southern, which closed in 2020. His auction record remains small in number and is split across a handful of German and international houses, including Lempertz, Ketterer Kunst, and Phillips, with no confirmed sale dates for his two highest recorded results, so any single result should be weighed against the thinness of that supply rather than treated as a stable price trend.