Avital Burg: Textures of Time
12 October – 3 November 2022
A Crean & Company exhibition in association with Browse & Darby
19 Cork St
London
W1S 3LP
Crean & Company announces its first-ever physical gallery exhibition, focusing on the latest body of work by Brooklyn-based contemporary painter Avital Burg. Taking place at Browse & Darby from 12 October to 3 November, Textures of Time marks Burg’s first ever solo show in the UK with a new series of still lifes and portraits. Across 26 new paintings, the exhibition explores how Burg’s experimentation with the material possibilities of paint creates a compelling observational style, one informed by her personal range of cultural and artistic influences.
Likening her practice to a form of ‘visual journaling’, Burg’s paintings contemplate the
essence and passing of time. From urban wildflowers picked near her home to annual
birthday self-portraits, each painting carries an anecdotal significance, a memento to amparticular moment in Burg’s life.
Each one is titled like a caption in a photo album e.g. Paidge Avenue Flowers (week 23) (2021), a reference to the source of her city foraging and the phase of her pregnancy at the time. Based on the direct observation of the world she constructs in her studio, Burg paints using oils and wax, giving a three-dimensional quality to her work – each ephemeral moment rendered with an often-lifelike materiality. While at once grounded in specific ideas of time and place, Burg’s paintings also reflect on the non-linearity of these concepts.
Her paint formula itself embodies these ideas: the artist uses dried paint mixed in with fresh, ‘so there is a history within the paint itself’. Like the loose composition of her bouquets, capturing the changing lifespan of flowers wilting as they are painted, each work suggests the different layers of time often distilled into one moment.
Oil Charcoal and Pastel on Linen 40 x-30 inch
In Greenpoint Window and Dry Roses (2020), a self-portrait from her studio in Brooklyn, the brick backdrop recalls the stone of her native Jerusalem to create a scene that blends physical reality with her subjective perspective.
The brickwork is thickly rendered with a sculptural realism, overtaking Burg’s silhouette in the foreground – an illusory effect that indicates the prominence of memory and imagination in her paintings.
Burg’s painting draws from a range of sources, a measure of her international artistic training. In addition to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the painter also attended London’s Slade School of Art and the New York Studio School. Her work reveals the inspiration of both the European and American tradition, from Cézanne and Jasper Johns’ experimentation with the rules of perception to the detailed effects of Old Masters paintings and their ‘fantasy of the past’. Combining these influences into a highly personal artistic language, Burg re-shapes and re-energises the potential of the observational genre in contemporary painting.
Founder of Crean & Company Nick Crean said: ‘It’s an honour to introduce Avital’s paintings to Browse & Darby, at the heart of the London art scene in Mayfair. These paintings reflect perfectly the richness of her draughtsmanship and palette, an ode to her Renaissance mentors. Fragments of grandeur, peel back the layers, we can’t live in yesterday, but Avital shows us how yesterday’s skins can live in tomorrow.’
©2022 Avital Burg
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