During their* brief reign, the teenage emperor, Elagabalus, shocked the senate, soldiers, and general public by replacing Jupiter at the summit of the pantheon with the Syrian solar deity, Elagabal; coercing senators to participate in rituals from the eastern provinces that they deemed exotic and uncouth; and committing the sacrilege of marrying a vestal virgin so as to bear god-like children. They were also said to have made political appointments based on penis size, prostituted themself in the imperial palace, built a luxurious suicide tower so they could perish in style, and smothered guests to death at a dinner party with an avalanche of flower petals. Elagabalus ruled a mere four years until their assassination by the praetorian guard in 222. By one account, they hid from their pursuers in the palace latrines where they were discovered and slain. These thrilling but dubious stories and others like them form the basis of Elagabalus’s myth: the boy emperor as corrupt tyrant, sexual deviant and religious zealot. In the modern period, starting roughly with the Decadent art movement, Elagabalus’s fortunes began to turn. They have been subsequently recast as an uncompromising aesthete, anarchist and sexual martyr. Originally demonised, Elagabalus has belatedly been deified by their admirers nearly two millennia after their death.

Burgher sketches a response to these questions in “Our Lady of the Latrines” through sustained meditation on the likeness of Elagabalus, drawing from surviving imperial busts and coins as well as later representations in the works of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Simeon Solomon and others. The artist elaborates their image with hatched colored pencil over washes of watercolor. The technique imparts a flickering, chromatically intense surface to the portraits that summons the spirit of the emperor into the present. Other works depict salacious anecdotes about the emperor’s life. “Judgment of Paris” pictures Elagabalus playing the role of Venus on stage while senators in the audience react with a mixture of disgust and excitement. In “The Black Stone,” an orgy of revellers gyrate around the phallic meteorite that was the focal point of the cult of which the emperor served as high priest. In these latter works, Burgher loosens his grip on his materials, allowing his line to dance more freely around the paper and the watercolors to pool and reticulate. These modestly scaled works on paper serve a devotional function while ironically engaging with the hoary conventions of history painting. The exhibition will also include a selection of Burgher’s sketchbook pages, composition studies and research notes, a key component of his practice that has not been regularly shown.