Elijah Burgher Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1978 -

Elijah Burgher’s artwork indoctrinates viewers into a mystical cult of queer sexual energies. He produces small colored pencil drawings, as well as paintings on large canvas drop cloths. The latter works include sigil motifs—abstract glyphs that are concerned with semiotics but also evoke Modernist abstract painting.

Burgher’s drawings of nude men feature his friends and illustrate environments from his daily life; they function as relics of rituals, and 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 possess meaning—to truly embody it somehow,” Burgher said.