Bachelors

The gallery is pleased to present the New York solo debut of Chicago-based artist Elijah Burgher. The exhibitionentitled Bachelors features a series of seven colored pencil portraits, several large-scale paintings on drop cloths, and a group of unique pressure prints. An essay entitled Gay Death Cult by Allan Doyle will accompany the exhibition.

Continuing his exploration of the intersections between desire, fantasy, and daily life, the artist employs ideas from magick and the occult to address sexuality, sub-cultural formation, and the history of abstraction. A central idea in Burgher's work is that of a "sigil" – an emblem to which magical power is imputed. By recombining the letters of a written wish into a new symbol, Burgher’s pictures, or sigils, literally encode desire while embodying it abstractly through shape, color, and composition. The resulting abstract forms combine solar, anal, mechanical and sexual elements in constellations or diagrams that serve as ritual artifacts, devotional tools, and Gnostic riddles.

This most recent series, relating to an imaginary cult alternately called Bachelors of the Dawn (BotD) and Children of the Black Sun (CotBS), focuses on portraits of the cult members and the symbols used by the cult that relate esoterically to their philosophy or world-view. The artist states; "The figure of the bachelor is crucial, embodying a refusal to marry and repeat the structures of the nuclear family and the patterns of personhood it perpetuates. 

As Doyle observes: Burgher’s nudes exhibit a rigidity that seems equal parts neoclassical statue and rigor mortis. Standing or lying in hermetic spaces lit by an even, sourceless fluorescence, they do nothing. Their lack of affect heightens their physical presence. With their cool flesh, stiff comportment, and slightly averted gazes, the Bachelors appear as purely external beings, devoid of interiority. They withhold nothing. Made available to our gaze, they signal an awareness of the viewer’s presence without capitulating their self-possession. What are we to make of them? Like the sigils that surround them, the Bachelors frustrate the viewer’s interpretive instincts. Despite their display of skin, they resist appropriation for erotic fantasy.