April Gornik: New Work
Danese Gallery, New York
October 26 – December 1, 2001
Danese presents an exhibition of new work by April Gornik.
In her large, beautifully modulated charcoal drawings and her more intimately scaled paintings on canvas, April Gornik continues to offer a personal and poignant view of natural environments – fog-bound wetlands and marshes, rock strewn shorelines, broad blue bands of sea and sky, dramatic cloud formations – that celebrates the power of light to transform the human spirit and redefine the physical world.
There’s never a sign of human presence in her work because she wants the viewer to engage with her images in an absolutely private way. In eliminating the human element and heightening the drama of earth and sky, Gornik’s paintings take on a hallucinatory edge, and become more about the landscape of the imagination than anything one could locate in the real world.¹
April Gornik demonstrates light’s capacity to illuminate as well as to cast the world in shadow, to heal and inspire and conversely to evoke unsettling emotions. “I remember looking out at the horizon and experiencing a feeling of fear and unease…. My work is about the underbelly of the beauty of nature – and the dark side of nature is its indifference.”²
Her inspirations are both literary and art historical – Melville; Emerson; German romanticism, specifically the work of Caspar David Friedrich; and the American Luminists, especially the paintings of Frederic Church and Martin Johnson Heade.
I began to see that the Luminists were not simply recording scenes; in fact, they did not make traditionally realistic paintings at all….they attempted to recreate a landscape’s experience for the viewer…. Depicting the way the world actually looked was not nearly as important as conveying the sensation, the spiritual essence of the landscape.³
April Gornik was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1953. She received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1976 and currently lives and works in New York.
¹ Kristine McKenna, “The Allure of the Dark Side,” LA Times Calendar, May 1990, p. 3.
² April Gornik in Kristine McKenna, “The Allure of the Dark Side,” LA Times Calendar, May 1990, p. 3.
³ April Gornik, “Rooms in the View,” Art & Antiques, Summer 1988, p. 75.
DANESE GALLERY
41 East 57th Street, New York, NY, 10022
www.danesegallery.com
