Elijah burgher artist biography

Elijah Burgher’s artwork indoctrinates viewers into a mystical cult of queer sexual energies. He produces small colored-pencil drawings, as well as paintings of sigils on large canvas drop cloths.

Burgher utilizes ideas from magic and the occult to address sexuality, subcultural formation and the history of abstraction. Citing 20th century occultist Austin Osman Spare’s system, he creates sigils—emblems to which magical power is imputed.

Elijah burgher artist biography

By recombining the letters that spell out a wish into a new symbol, Burgher’s pictures of sigils literally encode desire while embodying it abstractly through shape, color and composition. Burgher’s drawings of nude men feature his friends and illustrate environments from his daily life, functioning as relics of rituals.

They have a quasi-erotic quality, grounding the works’ more abstract components in the realm of reality. “At base, I want to know whether an artwork, any artwork, can