On a dark night in the middle of the winter, Factory Fresh’s “Anxiety Room” promises to burst and drip with color like a British candy factory next to the drab stretch of warehouses along Flushing Avenue.
The dense, silly, technicolor drawings of British artist Jon Burgerman and German artist Jim Avignon, who cross the pond for their first collaborative exhibit, will be featured at Factory Fresh gallery (1053 Flushing Avenue) in Williamsburg starting Feb. 12.
Burgerman is flying over from Nottingham to stay with Factory Fresh founders Ali Ha and Ad Deville two weeks prior to the show, where he will be “wrecking an entire wall, which can take hours and hours,” with his illustrations, as Deville put it. The artist has become famous in England for his monster-like cartoon characters which have proliferated as figurines for Kidrobot, a toy company, in illustration books, as tattoos, on iPod and computer cases, on belts and dolls, on highway billboards, and as video game avatars.
“We’ve known him a while now,” Deville said. “Every day he would wake up to do drawings while everybody else was playing video games or eating cereal. He takes everything lightheartedly, especially himself. He’s on an insane path.”
Burgerman’s prodigious output and illustrative style are akin to the anime sensibilities of Takashi Murakami, whose work was featured at the Brooklyn Museum of Art this past April. His monster characters are always evolving, and lately Burgerman has been overlapping the characters in a wallpaper mash-up, creating a crowd of sinister-looking cartoon beasts on an acid trip. All that is missing is the yellow submarine.
“It’s not just graphics, it’s hand-drawn,” Deville said. “You can’t just call him an illustrator because he does it all.”
Sharing the twin bill with Burgerman is Jim Avignon, a pop-icon artist and author who lives in Germany and New York. Though both Avignon and Burgerman had gallery exhibits in Tokyo last last year around the same time, this is the first time both have been featured in the same gallery. Avignon’s illustrated paintings veer away from consistent characters in different situations, but share Burgerman’s sensibilities in both color and scale.
Adding to the excitement, both Burgerman and Avignon will participate in “Anxiety Boom”, a live and unpredictable illustrating demonstration held during the gallery’s opening night. The artists will be making their drawings from scratch and painting them in. Not every artist enjoys composing work in front of a live and raucous audience, eagerly commenting on the creative process as it unfolds in front of them. Count Deville as one graphic pop artist who will be more than happy to be in the audience that night instead of on the stage.
“I think its those kinds of artists who do these characters; they can do that stuff in their sleep,” Deville said.
Deville and Ha have been busy cleaning their gallery space for the past few weeks to get it ready for Burgerman’s stay.
“I’m happy we can feature shows with people we know and have had a relationship with. Will we still have a relationship after he stays here for two weeks? Who knows?” said Ha smiling.
“Anxiety Room” featuring Jon Burgerman and Jim Avignon opens Feb. 12 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. at Factory Fresh (1053 Flushing Ave.) and runs until March 15. For more information, visit www.factoryfresh.net.
