Jon Burgerman (British, b. 1979) makes doodle-based drawings, paintings and sculptures populated by cartoonish characters with googly eyes, working through improvisation and play rather than planning. Based in Brooklyn, New York, his work is held in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Science Museum in London. Since April 2020 he has also released six sell-out NFT collections through Nifty Gateway.
He studied art foundation in Bournville, Birmingham, and graduated in fine art from Nottingham Trent University in 2001. A monograph of his work, Pens Are My Friends, was published by IdN in 2008, the same year he took part in the Underbelly Project, in which artists exhibited inside a disused, century-old New York subway station. Since 2017 he has also published several picture books, including Splat! with Penguin Random House and Rhyme Crime with Oxford University Press. Shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, while his wife was living in Los Angeles for work, he began making blurred spray-paint works that let him articulate a growing sense of isolation and melancholy he could not express in his earlier, cleaner cartoon style. This body of work led to “Cradle”, a 2024 solo exhibition of aerosol paintings on canvas at Hunted Projects in Edinburgh exploring vulnerability and the need for comfort in uncertain times. In 2026 he presented “Hold On, It Won't Last Long”, his first solo exhibition in New York, mixing paintings with inflatable sculptures.
