Jürgen Bürgin - an interview
PUNCH - A Visual Story is Jürgen Bürgin’s second photography book. It's an intimate and revealing journey into the world of boxing in New York, Berlin and Lisbon.
This work presents an African carved wooden bust, meticulously photographed within a vertical frame and set against a deep black background.
The figure is defined by its elongated head, rising proudly from a narrow neck and truncated torso, an arched, helmet-like crown, and deeply cut eyes. The heavy brow, narrow nose, and full, projecting lips exhibit clear signs of age: worn edges, abrasions, exposed lighter wood, darkened polish and decades-old patina.
The heavy chiaroscuro makes the bust appear suspended, almost archival, as though removed for examination. This isolation is important because it asks the viewer to look closely at the object’s form and presence without distraction.
Within the broader Ultramar series, this photograph is a document of migration and historical memory. The project maps the material presence of Africa in the everyday lives of families who relocated to Portugal after the 1974 revolution, at the end of the authoritarian regime and the start of the accelerated process of decolonization.
The narrative of the Portuguese returnee family is not immediately visible in the image itself. This aesthetic distance is precisely what allows the work to function so effectively within contemporary documentary practice, offering a rigorous, unsentimental examination of how colonial memory quietly persists in the present, both object and witness.
The print is intimate rather than monumental, and its scale is highly suitable for private collectors focused on contemporary European photography, documentary practice, and post-colonial visual culture.
For institutions, it is particularly relevant within collections addressing migration and trauma, decolonization, as well as the necessary reflective space for dialogue about heritage and identity.
Materials: Radiant White cotton paper, Inkjet photography print, Black lacquered frame with housing, 5mm PVC and standard glass.
Size: 60 x 42,86 cm
Framed Size: 62,5 x 45,5 cm
Year: 2021
Series: Ultramar
Hand-signed by artist and dated in pencil.
Unique edition
Includes a Certificate of Authenticity
This large-scale piece is a striking visual statement and an unsettling cultural comment on the dichotomy between animal rights and human hypocrisy.
The image of a turkey marked by a historically-charged tattoo calls for a dialogue about global supply chains and the arbitrary distinctions we draw within the animal kingdom, questioning our role in maintaining planetary inequality.
Materials: Fineart Luster paper, Inkjet photography print
Size: 210 x 140 cm
Year: 2021
Hand-signed by artist and dated.
Unique edition.
Includes a Certificate of Authenticity
Price upon request, talk to us.
The first book of photographic and artistic documentation of Boxing in Portugal.
This singular and groundbreaking work documents the daily side of the sport in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area between 2015 and 2017, through an intimate journey through the events, clubs, and the communities that support it.
Softcover, 22 x 28.5cm, 154 pages, Portuguese and English.
Lisbon, 2022.
GUSTAVO LOPES PEREIRA
This is a mysterious and melancholic piece. A close, low-lit large photograph of two bare adult feet resting on a teal-blue rug, the composition is tight and frontal, with the feet occupying the lower and central areas of the frame while the upper portion falls into near-black shadow. Directional light catches the skin, the deep wrinkles, toenails, veins, and folds, as well as the dense synthetic texture of the rug.
Color and light are central to the photograph’s effect. The rug is rendered in unusually sharp detail: each synthetic fiber is legible, and the cool blue of the pile reads strongly against the warm, slightly reddened skin.
The image is direct in its subject matter but carefully controlled in its visual emphasis: it withholds the face, the room, and most contextual information, concentrating instead on a bodily fragment and a domestic surface.
Within Lopes Pereira’s Ultramar series, this narrowing of attention is significant. The project sets out to document the presence of Africa in families who migrated to Portugal 1974 through the residue of personal and family life. The title links the sitter to Matola and to the 1950s, at the height of the colonial period, while the photograph itself offers no overt geographical marker.
It is this gap between caption and image that does most of the productive work, allowing the domestic detail to carry a larger biographical and collective weight.
For private collectors focused on contemporary European photography, documentary practice, and post-colonial visual culture, this work represents a notably subdued, indirect methodology. The choice to photograph feet rather than a face is restrained and pointed. Feet suggest age, movement, labor, migration, and the physical duration of a life, but the image does not force these associations.
This opacity is one of the works’ greatest strengths. In its refusal of spectacle, it allows history to appear as something intimate, embodied, and still present in private rooms.
Materials: Radiant White cotton paper, Inkjet photography print, Black lacquered frame with housing, 5mm PVC and standard glass.
Size: 60 x 42,86 cm
Framed Size: 62,5 x 45,5 cm
Year: 2021
Series: Ultramar
Hand-signed by artist, numbered and dated in pencil.
Unique edition
Includes a Certificate of Authenticity