Trevor Burgess

Trevor’s wonderfully colourful paintings are about the ordinary business of living. His work has celebrated the multicultural life of cities for over 25 years, inspired by his local environment in London and his travels in Europe, South America and India. Always, the emphasis is on the rich texture of urban life: the houses, people on the streets, in shops, markets, public spaces – the social spaces in which people live.

Trevor’s work is characterised by a distinctively tactile and expressive use of oil paint and has its origins in many years of painting directly from observation. Following his graduation from the MA Fine Art course in Barcelona in 1997/8, Trevor moved to London, and began using his own photographs as source material to make paintings of his immediate urban environment. Trevor does not attempt to replicate the conventions of photography. In all representational art there is a gap between what is depicted and how it’s depicted. The peculiar pleasures of painting, for him, are all about this gap.

The artist often uses a glossy liquid paint which brings out the flashes of bright colour that animate urban space. The fluidity, coarseness and texture of the paint contribute to a sense of the thickening of the air in the urban atmosphere, the ambiguity and the discontinuity of visual experience.

Trevor works on several bodies of work simultaneously.  These include a series of paintings depicting markets around the world and a series entitled, “A Place to Live” of over 60 small paintings of London homes. In 2015 he received a commission for a large-scale triptych relating to Granary Square at the centre of the regeneration of Kings Cross, this has also resulted in a series of studies and related paintings. Examples from each of these series are available to view in our portfolio.

Trevor’s own home in South London, converted from a builders’ yard by the artist and his partner, is full of individual character and is the perfect backdrop to several of the artist’s paintings.  The home was the subject of a three page feature in The Observer magazine interiors section in summer 2018 and was the cover feature with seven pages of photos in Homes & Antiques magazine May 2019.

Trevor’s work is widely collected and has been shown in over 100 exhibitions in the UK and abroad. His work has been selected by artists, collectors and critics for numerous prizes, competitions and awards. He was awarded the Discerning Eye Regional Painting Prize in 2011 and, most recently, it was selected for the Lynn Painter Stainers Prize and by Sacha Craddock for the APT Creekside Open.

Trevor also trained as a curator at the Norwich Gallery, Norfolk Institute of Art and Design. He has curated and co-curated exhibitions including “IN THE CITY”, which brought together nine artists working with imagery of the city and ideas around urban space, which debuted at Lion & Lamb London in 2014 and in 2018 toured to the East Gallery, Norwich University of the Arts and the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich.

Trevor's curated exhibition, "Where We Live" launched at Alan Baxter Gallery, London, and toured to Millennium Gallery, Sheffield Museums; and the Angear Visitor Centre, University of Nottingham, and was seen by over 60,000 visitors. 

See Our Feature on Trevor Burgess