Jon Burgerman (b. 1979 UK) is a New York-based British artist. His highly distinctive fuzzy-edged characters epitomise the paradoxes of contemporary life. Their seemingly simple googly eyes betray a range of emotional complexities and anxieties, with comically distressed expressions and collapsing forms underlined by titles such as Xanax, Dualist, Lexapro and Chameleon (2022). Expressing creativity and having fun is key to Burgerman’s practice. It's his belief that simple creative acts can allow people to change not only their world but the world around them

"I create playful and humorous paintings and objects that cloak a collective anxiety about the turbulent world we live in. Soft friendly shapes and bold colours interplay to create compositions that display an aesthetic joy but belie conflicting emotions beneath the surface. Vivid expressions of abstracted cartoon forms are utilised as key components of the compositions; the amorphous genderless masses are stacked, piled, squashed and delicately balanced, often moments away from potential collapse or complete evaporation. The use of aerosol paint allows for fluid and spontaneous creation, allowing for a loose, improvisational quality to the pieces. The paintings are often in conflict with themselves; at once tough and soft, friendly and scary, happy and sad. The characters in the works have cubistic personalities, with their various emotional states shared on a single plain. These relate to a generational mental health crisis, exasperated by climate anxiety, the pandemic, the narrowing of political choice and financial insecurity. Despite the fraught intensions, the light and colourful nature of the works offer a positive wider outlook and that there is always the chance for hope and joy, or at least, that's how I ultimately feel when making the works."