Robert Burden's Massive "Holy Batman" Turns Dark Knight Into Religious Experience

WIRED
By Lewis Wallace

"The Holy Batman" (2013) Oil on Canvas, 2013. 85 inches x 145 inches

CALIFORNIA---Robert Xavier Burden used to paint nudes, but nearly a decade ago he shifted his eye from bare flesh to another sort of fetish. Now he spends thousands of hours creating massive, and massively nerdy, oil paintings of toys from his youth. His oil paintings, which he spends hundreds of hours on a ladder to create, elevate common toys almost to the level of religious artifacts. One of his latest — The Holy Batman, which will be exhibited for the first time in a San Francisco show that [opened this past] Saturday — takes Burden’s obsession with the subject matter to a whole new level. He’s crammed images of more than 50 action figures and scores of Batman references onto the 12-foot-by-7-foot canvas. While his megapaintings can fetch between $18,000 and $25,000, Burden said his smaller pieces tend to be easier to peddle. [link]

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