Jon Burgerman on Melancholy, Multiplicity, and His First Proper New York Solo

I meet Jon Burgerman in his studio, surrounded by drawings, paintings, books, objects, and a constellation of characters in various states of becoming. It is the kind of space that makes clear, immediately, that no single category will hold what he does. Painting lives alongside picture books. Sculptural objects sit near works on paper. Ideas migrate freely from one form to another. [Read on]

This flexibility is intentional. Burgerman has lived in New York for fifteen years, but this show at A Hug From The Art World is his first proper solo gallery exhibition in the city. He’s done pop-ups, group shows, and projects in different boroughs, but this moment arrives deliberately.

“I could have done it earlier,” he tells me. “But you can’t just do it for the sake of it. If you don’t like the people or don’t have a good feeling, you shouldn’t do it.” With this gallery, and with Adam, who runs it, the alignment felt right.

That alignment did not begin through the conventional art world pipeline. Adam first encountered Burgerman through a picture book, one he read aloud to his son every night for months. That domestic, repetitive intimacy with the work eventually led to paintings, then to conversations, and finally to a show. It is a story that feels emblematic of Burgerman’s practice: one thing leads organically to another, and accessibility is not a compromise but a value.

Permission to be multiple

Burgerman is candid about the realities of sustaining an artistic life. There is a necessity, of course, rent and food and time. But there is also temperament.

“I think that’s just the kind of artist I am,” he says. “I don’t think you have to define yourself in one way. We can be multiples.”

That sentence quietly dismantles a lot of inherited anxiety around commercial work, collaboration, and legitimacy. Burgerman does not romanticize fine art purity, nor does he apologize for making things that travel widely. He speaks openly about how the expectation has shifted. Images now require context, documentation, performance. Artists are asked not only to make the work, but to narrate it continuously.

Still, he resists the idea that medium confers moral weight. Paintings can be commercial. Manufactured objects can still function as artworks. The distinction, for him, is not about hierarchy but intention and openness.

“I like having a range of things,” he says. “Some things are accessible in one way, some in another. That’s okay. One can lead to the other.”

The hot dog as sculpture

Few motifs capture this philosophy better than the hot dog. What could easily read as a joke becomes, in Burgerman’s hands, a recurring sculptural form that moves through contexts with surprising elasticity.

He tells me about the inflatable hot dog pool float he designed. To him, it was a sculpture, a multiple that he did not have to fabricate himself. Once released into the world, it took on a life of its own. People photographed it. Took it to festivals. Threw it into pools. In one video, two children beat the inflatable hot dog mercilessly in a sunlit swimming pool, spinning it into the air until it glistened.

“That photograph is a piece of work,” he says. “Seeing it out there, doing something else, that’s the artwork.”

That same object became a point of connection with Adam. Burgerman messaged him asking for the video. From there, a relationship formed. From there, a show.

Filling the ceiling

The exhibition itself carries this logic into physical space. For a brief moment, Burgerman says, everything felt grown up. Then the hot dogs went on the ceiling.

Jon Burgerman, Raise the Ceiling (detail). Courtesy of Jon Burgerman and A Hug From the Art World.

The balloon installation, titled Raise the Ceiling, quickly became the gravitational center of the show. It was playful, exhausting, slightly unhinged, and completely sincere.

“The minute we started doing it, I thought, I’m not sure,” he admits. “Then, when it was almost covered, I thought, oh no. Let’s just get rid of the paintings and have this.”

The remark is half-joke, half-truth. The installation functions as both spectacle and work, an edition that can be purchased, reinstalled, and reanimated elsewhere. It requires labor, coordination, and absurdity. It also gives visitors permission to laugh inside a gallery, without being told they are doing something wrong.

Melancholy beneath the surface

Despite the humor, Burgerman acknowledges that the works in this show carry a different emotional register.

“The stuff at Hug has a melancholy running through it,” he says.

When I tell him I sense a kind of longing or detachment in the newer pieces, he agrees. He offers possible explanations without fixing on one. Political climate. Actual climate. Aging. Relationships. Life accumulating weight.

“I’ve always been pretty melancholy,” he admits, describing himself as someone people often read as grumpy or self-deprecating. At one point, he says, only half joking, “I put all my joy in the work. So there’s not much left for me.”

What matters is how quickly this internal state is shared. People respond to the work because they recognize themselves in it. They message him to say, yes, the same. The melancholy is not confessional. It is ambient. It belongs to the moment as much as to the maker.

Making as a human good

When I ask whether he sees creativity as therapeutic, his answer is unromantic and generous.

“All creativity is therapeutic,” he says. “Turning one thing into another. Getting something from nothing. It’s good for us. Outside of skill, good or bad, taste. Just doing it is positive.”

This belief underpins much of his practice. The books, the objects, the murals, the collaborations. They are not meant to sit on pedestals forever. They are meant to be encountered, used, misused, and lived with.

“If someone sees my work and thinks, I want to make something too,” he says, “that’s the best thing my art could do.”

On New York and looking

Burgerman goes to a lot of exhibitions. He talks about New York as a place of constant looking, where rooms fill and empty unpredictably. Where some openings buzz with bodies and others feel almost ghosted.

“I feel like a tourist,” he says. “Passing through, observing.”

He describes the strange friendships that form this way. People who exist only in galleries, who later migrate into other parts of life. It can feel like a club, but one he stays peripheral to by choice. Curious, but not consuming.

That stance feels key to understanding this show. It is not a bid for domination or arrival. It is a conversation with a city he has been watching for years.

Letting go of the fantasy

Near the end of our conversation, I asked where he hopes this show will sit when he looks back years from now.

He laughs. The fantasy version is obvious. The humble beginning. The leap to something bigger. But it does not animate him.

We joke about the silly fantasies many have about being next to Pablo Picasso, riding that escalator toward institutional canonization. Early in his journey, that fantasy simply fell out of his head.

“I didn’t give it up,” he says. “I just forgot it.”

What remains is the work. The pleasure of making. The willingness to stop when something has gone as far as it needs to, and to wait for the next idea to arrive, even if it takes time.

For now, that includes hot dogs on the ceiling, drawings that feel softer and dustier than before, and a show that holds humor and sadness at the same time. It is a fitting first New York solo. Not an arrival. A continuation.

→ More exhibitions and events in London, Berlin, New York, and Los Angeles

For more art and travel inspiration, reviews or guides browse through our features, download the ArtRabbit App for iPhone or Android, or subscribe to one of our city-specific newsletters. You can also follow us on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest.