The title Sim City is a reference to the seminal 1990’s city building simulator game of the same name by Will Wright. Burgerman considers parallels between game playing and world building with art making and also to the simulations we necessitate for ourselves in our everyday lives.
“I want to make expressive and open works, where the viewer can not only play with narrative strands suggested by the characters and forms but also emotionally connect with the textures, colours and very fabric of the paintng itself.”..JON BURGERMAN
The title Sim City is a reference to the seminal 1990’s city building simulator game of the same name by Will Wright. Burgerman considers parallels between game playing and world building with art making and also to the simulations we necessitate for ourselves in our everyday lives.
“I want to make expressive and open works, where the viewer can not only play with narrative strands suggested by the characters and forms but also emotionally connect with the textures, colours and very fabric of the paintng itself.”..JON BURGERMAN
This collection, created at the start of the year, is influenced by a wide range of artists and movements including the jazzy compositions of Stuart Davis, the playfulness in expression of Jean Dubuffet, and the loose gestural mark making of Cy Twombly, particularly in the dryly titled ‘Cry Twombly’, 2023.
Animation and 90’s video games also strike inspiration for Burgerman, as evidenced in the smeared facial expressions (smearing images is a technique to suggest movement in animation) and flat 2D plains that make up each composition, such as in ‘Parklife’, 2023 and ‘Upstairs Downstairs’, 2023.
