Zeitlaich

The German painter Jonas Burgert was born in Berlin in 1969, studied at the Berlin University of the Arts in 1991–1996 and had a breakthrough in 2005. He draws motif from areas such as science fiction, comics and ideas of the subconscious. He says he aims to portray the expression and atmosphere of his subjects, and he avoids horror and violence.^[1]

Zeitlaich shows a large number of humans, animals and objects, painted in pink, red, blue and yellow colours. Central in the picture is a three-metre-high bald and dark-skinned man wearing a three-piece suit and pink gloves. Among the disparate subjects are tigers, flamingos, a headless zebra, embryos, a naked woman at a piano, a car and a human skull.^[1][2] Many animals are hard to determine and have traits of both cats and dogs.^[3] Burgert describes the picture as a "concentration of irritation" and says he wanted it to have "this boundless excessive demand that we have".^[2]

Burgert created Zeitlaich in his 800 m² (960 sq yd) studio in an industrial part of Berlin's Weißensee area. He began to make the painting a year and a half before it was exhibited. The canvas is 22 metres (72 ft) long and 6 metres (20 ft) high and was the largest he had used.^[1][2] The picture is painted in oil using custom-made stepladders and metre-long extensions for the brush handles.^[1]

Burgert sketched the figures individually and says the greatest challenge was to create drama despite the lack of interaction between the subjects.^[1] A time-lapse video posted on the Internet shows how Zeitlaich evolved. The first discernible figure was a human silhouette above the ground near the middle; the figure remains in the finished painting but in a heavily reworked form. Burgert then began with the part in the middle to the left, where there is a skip from which animals seem to emerge.^[3]