April Gornik: The Other Side
Miles McEnery Gallery, New York
7 September - 21 October 2023
APRIL GORNIK
The Unbroken World, 2023
Oil on linen, 70 x 115 inches, 177.8 x 292.1 cm
© April Gornik, courtesy Miles McEnery Gallery
Miles McEnery Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings by APRIL GORNIK at 525 West 22nd Street in New York. This exhibition, titled The Other Side, is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Annie Godfrey Larmon.
Over the course of her nearly four-decade career, April Gornik has been unwavering in her devotion to the sky, the earth, the horizon, and her experience of their intersection as a leaping off point for her painting practice. Working from memory, dreams, and photographs, April Gornik splices the real and the imagined, ultimately translating them into oil paint on linen.
With uncanny manipulation of the natural laws of gravity and perspective, April Gornik thrusts the viewer into her dramatic panoramas, forcing us to reckon with the sublimity of creation, the power of our changing climate, and the inevitability of our own mortality.
Above all, April Gornik’s work gets at “a simpler, enduring truth—that no matter the complexity of our systems for distinguishing human realms from nature, we are indivisible from it,” writes Annie Godfrey Larmon in the catalogue essay, “We might think of Gornik’s paintings, then, as images of the landscape as it is internalized. When she paints the glint of sun on water, she translates a feeling stored in memory about the sun hitting water, about being within and of the environment. In this way, her work finds resonance in the paintings of Joan Mitchell, who took a synesthetic approach to landscapes and who sought (to paraphrase Mitchell) to paint what nature left her with.”
APRIL GORNIK (b. 1953 in Cleveland, OH) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada. Since then, April Gornik has gone on to become one of the foremost figures of contemporary American landscape painting, having exhibited at the 1989 Whitney Biennial and both the 41st and 56th editions of the Venice Biennale. In 2021, she cofounded The Church, an innovative artist residency and exhibition space in Sag Harbor, NY.
April Gornik has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Danese/Corey Gallery, New York, NY; Pace Prints, New York, NY; Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH; Barbara Edwards Contemporary, Toronto, Canada; Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Canada; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, NE; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY.
Her work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions including the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
April Gornik’s work may be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.
The artist April Gornik lives and works in Sag Harbor, NY.
Related post on Wanafoto:
April Gornik: New Work @ Danese Gallery, New York, (October – December 2001)
MILES McENERY GALLERY
525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
