There are three great reasons for making a trip to Great Yarmouth before the 24th May. First, Great Yarmouth just seems to be getting culturally more interesting year on year, so a visit to the town is worthwhile anyhow. Second there is a brand-new gallery, an event which needs to be celebrated, and third is that gallery's spectacular inaugural exhibition of work by Trevor Burgess.
The South Quay Gallery is a brave and wonderful new venture by photographer Pete Huggins and his wife Moira, who have moved into their five-bay, three-story, Georgian riverside building that had previous incarnations as the Nelson Museum and as the Yare Gallery (https://southquaygallery.com). The couple have now created a home, a huge exhibition space, a small café and spaces for art classes and workshops. A soft opening with a display of their own vast and impressive art collection went well, but now comes a major show by an artist who won Best International Artist in last year’s VAA Artist of the Year competition – a major coup for Yarmouth.
Despite these international links, Trevor Burgess has local history. In Norwich, he was Assistant Curator at the Norwich Gallery at what is now Norwich University of the Arts, and he also founded the artist-run Warehouse Artists Studios between 1990 and 1997. In Hackney, 18 years ago, he started work on a large series of figurative canvases depicting street markets in London which then proliferated to include busy open markets across Europe, South America and India, all full of people, produce and pigment. Colour predominated and the sense of individual, independent vendors doing their thing, and the idea that we were revisiting the 'painting of modern life', are testament to Burgess's deep pleasure in the art of looking and our shared visual history. They followed in a solid tradition of street photography and townscape painting.
Wrapped Stack, San Juan oil on canvas 122 × 210 cm
And then, around 2016, came the intriguing awareness that after markets close, outdoor or in, stuff, whether it is the crates or the food, must all be tidied away, secured, ready to remerge the following day. And some stalls simply close. And these stacked objects, or the tarpaulin covered stalls, create a very different subject matter. The subject, now unpeopled and sculptural, is hard to define – is it still life, is it landscape, is it animate, a dormant animal? They are certainly different beasts than the open markets, filled with people and life, but they are no less colourful. We usually associate landscape painting with aspects of national or cultural identity, with history, but these canvases resist such resonances because they are international and universal still lives, imbued with a strange sense of familiarity, obscure, hidden and protective. These paintings acquired added resonance for Burgess when the pandemic started. Markets and trading were curtailed, and the general emptiness of life and social interaction enabled an additional powerful reading of his imagery.
Wrap Up (Bengalaru) oil on canvas 139 × 280 cm
The major works here are very large, painted uncomfortably while flat on the ground, and together they form a magnificent series of colour-coded works imbued, and I can't believe I am saying this, with a deep spiritual quality of stillness, of reassurance, of continuity. The single dominant colour of each of the large works is arresting, and in the ample space of the gallery form a vivid spectrum around the walls. Light blue, followed by the dark green of Wrap-up (Mula, Spain), then a renaissance ultramarine followed by a strident yellow, and then the flat, solid red of Frutos Secos Valencia.
Wrap-up (Mula, Spain) oil on canvas 160 × 280 cm
The challenge in these large images is the decision on the painting's boundary, on how much context is shown. Just enough to give a sense of location and space, but not so much that the essential object, the 'found work' is diminished. Burgess manages this tightrope with finesse, and although he has talked about the 'emptiness at the centre of the canvas', I am not sure I agree with him. These canvases with their simultaneously enigmatic yet everyday motifs, I find life-affirming, colourful, joyful and reassuring, humanist creations.
Frutos Secos (Valencia) oil on canvas 200 × 150 cm
Review by Keith Roberts.
Stack & Wrap continues until 24 May 2026 at the South Quay Gallery in Great Yarmouth. Entry is free.