Trevor Burgess is an artist-curator based in London. He makes paintings of aspects of daily urban life in his home city and reflecting his travels in Latin America, Europe, India and North Africa. He has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, including solo exhibitions at galleries in Spain, Switzerland and the UK. His work is widely collected and has been selected by artists, collectors and critics for national and international prizes, competitions and awards. He was nominated Best International Artist 2025 in the VAA Artist of the Year Awards, and shortlisted for the international BBA Artist Prize 2024 in Berlin.
His fascination with painting began at school in the North of England where, aged 17, he won a bursary to travel and make paintings in the South of France. The story of his artistic journey and early work is told in a series of video essays, People coming out of the paint by Ambreen Hameed, made for his 60th birthday exhibition Back Stories at Anna Lovely Gallery.
Trevor 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 was based from 1990 to 1997. During this period he was closely involved with the artist-run studio movement, and worked with the National Artists Association to launch a Code of Practice for the Visual Arts.
He took part in the site specific exhibition, Wholesale, in 1996. The installation filled the walls of a former cold store from floor to ceiling with a decorative cycle of eighteen paintings of massed fruit and vegetable produce. In this work a theme emerged which is still present in his painting: the function and pleasures of display in daily life are repeated and played off against the context and aesthetics of painting.
Trevor studied MA European Fine Art at Winchester School of Art, based in Barcelona. During this period he produced a series of large, figurative paintings exploring the relationships of families and children, and, following graduation, exhibited at the Galerie Daniel Wahrenberger in Zurich, Switzerland.In Barcelona he also made a series about Castellers, the popular Catalan custom of creating human towers as a street display. The Castellers were exhibited as a solo exhibition at the Galeria Groc in Barcelona and toured in Catalonia.
On return to the UK to live in London in 1999, he began painting images of people going about their ordinary lives in the streets, derived from his own snapshot photographs, which were exhibited in a solo exhibition touring to three venues in Spain in 2007. In 2010 he began a series of paintings, 'A Place to Live'', depicting homes in London, derived from estate agents’ ads in newspapers. The series currently consists of over 60 paintings, which, taken together, offer a selective topography of the city's residential architecture. Works from the series have been widely shown in exhibitions in the UK, Spain and Germany. In 2015 he completed a private commission for a triptych of Granary Square, King’s Cross. In 2016 his solo exhibition, 'The Market Paintings' at Menier Gallery, London, included paintings of markets around the world. He has shown his paintings of urban street life in several solo shows including 'Urban People' at D.M.Stallard, London in 2019, Mandell’s Gallery, Norwich in 2022 and 'Paintings of London' at Town House Spitalfields in 2025.
In 2015, he received a commission from Townshend Landscape Architects for a triptych painting of Granary Square, the centrepiece of the King's Cross development in London. This generated a series of studies and related paintings.
The twin crises of Brexit and the Covid pandemic provoked a radical rupture in his work, in which he began experimenting with inverting colour in his paintings. The Inverse Colour paintings were first shown in a solo show at Flashback, London in 2021 and later online at Kato Wong Gallery (2022) and at Crypt Gallery, Norwich in 2025.
A significant element of Burgess's practice has been his work as an artist-curator, in a number of successful exhibitions in which he has collaborated with other painters, exploring the social context of painting. He has curated and co-curated exhibitions including 'IN THE CITY', nine artists working with imagery of international cities, which debuted at Lion & Lamb London in 2014 and in 2018 toured to University Galleries in Norwich and Greenwich. He co-curated with Marguerite Horner “Inner and Outer Worlds” at Bermondsey Project Space in 2018; with Alexandra Baraitser “This Instead of That”, at ArtHouse1 in 2019; and, with Madi Acharya-Baskerville, “That Island Feeling” at Terrace Gallery in 2022. The nationally acclaimed exhibition Where We Live, five artists, five places - the social landscape of England explored in painting, was seen by over 60,000 visitors on tour to London, Sheffield Museums and the University of Nottingham in 2021 to 2023. Most recently, he co-curated with Raksha Patel, 'Standing Ground' – rethinking the painted British landscape” at Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London in 2024, which includes a catalogue supported by British Art Network.
He has also written about art. In 2018 his interview with artist John Kiki was published in Turps Banana magazine #19. In 2025 he presented his talk 'What Colour is that?' exploring the perplexities of colour from a painters perspective to Leeds Philosophical & Literary Society and Norfolk Contemporary Art Society.
Since 2010 Burgess has shown regularly with Cavaliero Finn. His work is also featured by Galerie W O S Zurich. Over 100 of his paintings are available for licenced reproduction at Bridgeman Images.
