Herk Man Print - Limited Edition of 20

Christian Burnham was born in Eastbourne, England in 1973. Christian’s father was a civil engineer, and during the seventies his work took Christian’s family to South Africa for several years, before returning to Europe to relocate in Sweden and Belgium. By the age of twenty he was multilingual in four languages. From an early age Christian realised he had a talent for riding off road motorcycles, and in 1991 he made the brave decision to move to Belgium and focus on a career as a professional motocross rider. For the next fifteen years he competed at the very highest level, racing for both British and German race teams, winning the German national championships, and scoring regular top ten finishes in the world motocross championships. His racing took him to the four corners of the globe and gave him the chance to experience so many extraordinary cultural differences across the world. Retiring from a life of top-flight racing hit Christian badly. The massive hole left by his racing developed into a loss of purpose, and left Christian with challenges that he had never experienced before. His life descended to lows that no one could ever have imagined, and a severe alcohol addiction rapidly followed and tore his world apart. It was during his period of rehabilitation that Christian rediscovered his passion for art, giving him the strength to explore and regenerate the inner mechanics of his creative conscience, and to start the long journey to overcome the biggest challenge of his life. His love for art gave him back the sense of purpose in life that he was missing. Christian’s artwork embraces a highly personal reflection of his own life experiences. He is entirely self-taught, fuelling a limitless desire to create increasingly complex paintings using spray paints and stencils as his main medium. With a combination of contemporary art, graffiti and photo realistic images, he has developed his own style, and his work is finding its way into private collections around the world. Christian draws on inspiration from his very vivid imagination and his own life experiences, often because of changes in his own life brought on by his successful road to recovery.