P R E S S R E L E A S E
T r e v o r B u r g e s s
The Market Paintings
MENIERGALLERY, 51 Southwark Street, London SE1 1RU
29 November to 3 December 2016.
Open 11am to 6pm Tue to Fri, 11am to 4pm Saturday
Private Views:
6 to 9pm Tuesday 29 November
6 to 9pm Friday 2 December Market Stall, Quito. Oil on board,
122 x 81cm
Paintings of markets around the world including London, Paris, Mumbai, Mexico City,
Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia and Costa Rica
With his new exhibition, The Market Paintings, London-based artist Trevor Burgess brings
street markets from across the world to the Menier Gallery in Southwark. Burgess’s paintings
are immediately striking for their unusually vivid and refreshingly tactile use of paint. He
evokes a world of colour, taste and flavour that appeals directly to the viewer’s senses.
Burgess is best known for making paintings of urban life in London. HIs last series, A Place
To Live, created a beguiling topography of London's residential architecture. In 2015, he
completed a private commission of a triptych painting of Granary Square, King's Cross for
the prestigious Landscape Architects, Townshend and in 2014 he curated IN THE CITY, an
exhibition of nine painters exploring urban life on four continents.
Now, with this exciting new series of work, he has expanded his repertoire. The Market
Paintings range from London’s street and wholesale markets to the cities of Latin America
and India, Paris, Mexico City and Costa Rica. Paintings of flower stalls, meat counters,
piled up fruit and vegetable displays, fishboxes, cheeses and bric-a-brac take the still life
tradition out of the studio back into the streets.
At the heart of the work is a common pulse that Burgess identifies as a “culture of trade
and exchange that’s central to the existence of any city.” He makes a connection
between the display of the goods in a market and the basic function of painting – “it’s all
about ways of attracting the eye.”
Various paintings explore the relationship between the traders and the shoppers. “That’s
a very human thing”, he says, “Market stalls are actually quite theatrical, with the traders
performing for their public.” The paintings often enact this direct connection by putting
the viewer in the place of the shopper. “I like to remind myself of these things that bind
painting to the ordinary processes of living.”
Further information
For further information and images please contact Trevor Burgess
T: 020 8469 1445 M: 07425 138659
E: trevor@trevorburgess.co.uk www.trevorburgess.co.uk
Trevor Burgess, The Market Paintings. Press Release
Man selling melons, San Juan, Argentina.
Oil on board. 60 x 60cm
About the artist
Trevor Burgess is a painter who currently lives
and works in London. He has exhibited widely
in the UK and abroad, including solo
exhibitions at galleries in Spain, Switzerland
and the UK.
His work focuses on people and the urban
environment. He has evolved a distinctive
visual language in paint to convey his
experience of the visual texture of the city. His
paintings have been selected for exhibitions
by artists Eileen Hogan, Mark Wallinger and
Chris Orr and art critics Ossian Ward, Sacha
Craddock and William Feaver, amongst
others, and in 2011 he won the London and
South East Regional Painting Prize at the
Discerning Eye exhibition.
Trevor Burgess initially studied literature, going on to train and work as Assistant Curator at
the Norwich Gallery for four years at the time of the establishment of the East international
exhibition. He founded and steered the development of the Warehouse Artists Studios in
Norwich, where he based his practice from 1990 to 1997.
He then spent a year in Barcelona, studying on the Winchester School of Art MA European
Fine Art. Following his return to the UK to live in London in 1999, Burgess began painting
images of people going about their ordinary lives in the streets, derived from his own
snapshot photographs. These paintings were exhibited in a solo exhibition touring to three
venues in Spain in 2007. In 2010 he began an ongoing series of paintings called “A Place
to Live” depicting homes in London, sourced from estate agents’ adverts in newspapers.
The series currently consists of over 60 paintings.
In autumn 2014, he curated IN THE CITY at Lion and Lamb Gallery, London, an exhibition of
nine painters whose work explores their experience of the contemporary city. The
exhibition included images of cities on four continents and will be touring to the East
Gallery, Norwich University of the Arts in 2018.
In 2015 he completed a private commission from Townshend Landscape Architects for a
triptych painting of Granary Square, King’s Cross, which was designed by Townshends. This
has generated a series of related studies, drawings and paintings.
His series of paintings of street markets in London and in Latin America, where he has
travelled extensively, will be shown as a group for the first time in a solo exhibition at The
Menier Gallery, London from 28 November to 3 December 2016. Four of The Market
Paintings have been selected for this year’s Discerning Eye exhibition at the Mall Galleries,
London, from 17 to 26 November 2016.
Trevor Burgess
T: 020 8469 1445 M: 07425 138659
E: trevor@trevorburgess.co.uk W: www.trevorburgess.co.uk
Trevor Burgess, The Market Paintings. Press Release
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