April Gornik by Miles McEnery Gallery

APRIL GORNIK

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

BETWEEN!ATTENTION!AND!DISTRACTION"! APRIL!GORNIK’S!LANDSCAPE!PAINTINGS By Alex Bacon At first glance April Gornik’s land and seascapes seem innocuous, populated by rollicking hills and waves framed by dramatic skies and oceans. We might describe her accomplished painterly style as photo-realistic, but to stay with this reading would be to look only quickly and from a distance. While there is much to see from a quick and distant vantage, the key to appreciating Gornik’s work is to also move in close and pay a!ention to how she uses touch and composition, as these inflect the central element of her work—which is less what you see than what you feel when you look at her paintings. This feeling, which is o"en one of tension or even unease, is the product of what Gornik depicts and how she depicts it. This raises the question of facture, whereby the touch of the artist’s hand is figured, via the appendage of the brush, in the specificities of how paint is applied. Following this, we find that Gornik subtly modulates her surfaces, tightly kni!ing together some passages, while leaving others comparatively less resolved. This modulates and shi"s the viewer’s perceptual focus in kind, drawing it to certain areas while dispersing it in others. The parts that are denser with detail a!ract the eye, while the eye speeds across those that are more loosely executed. This game of a!raction and repulsion is what generates the visual dynamism of Gornik’s work. It is also what contributes to the feeling we get when beholding the scene that the artist sets before us. For this game creates a formal tension between the diﬀerent parts of a given painting that develops into a felt, existential sense of tension. For example, in Sea of Light and Dark, the brushiness of the clouds, which are lit by the silvery glow of moonlight, adds to the moodiness of the image, lending a sense of murkiness and

impenetrability to the scene. The artist’s hand is manifestly present and is a contributing factor to how we interpret Gornik’s paintings. It dispels the photographic quality that we might initially perceive. That her canvases are hand painted is readily apparent, and the facture—as discussed— gives us much to consider.

Memory is one consideration that her variable paint handling introduces. For we can say that one of the functions of the brush is to encode, as it were, an act of remembering. Like our recollections of places and events, parts of a memory are more and less easily summoned, and with varying degrees of certainty and detail. Thus we might understand Gornik paintings like Sea of Light and Dark to be, on some level, mapping a memory. Our ability as viewers to circulate through the remembered space is to trace the artist’s own acts of recollection. Of course, this is further complicated by the fact that the scenes in Gornik’s paintings are not simply memories, but have been consciously altered in specific ways that blend reality and imagination, which we will discuss shortly. O"en the works frame an expansive se!ing that we come with time to realize, a"er we imaginatively enter into it, is somehow ultimately closed oﬀ. For example, there is the way that the clouds and water in Sea of Light and Dark have a density, through the weight of paint as well as through the way they compositionally fill out the scene, that ends up compressing the painting at the top and bo!om. This correspondingly pressurizes the center of the canvas, producing an intensification that is somewhat alleviated by the clockwise swirling of the clouds away from the viewer. This eﬀect is most extreme in Sunset, which captures the very last moments of this phenomenon, where we see an electrified strip of light shooting through the tight passage that remains between darkened sky and water. This gives the scene an otherworldly feeling, as if we are witnessing either the first or last moments of the world itself. Qualities like this indicate to us that we are not looking at a traditional landscape painting. Historically, landscape motifs were ciphers for notions of control and surveillance through the

deployment of a God-like disembodied, all-seeing eye. Those aspects of Gornik’s paintings where vision closes in, and even shuts down, show how she avoids such demonstrations of putative mastery. While not always the explicit goal of her work, in our present moment, where the Earth faces unprecedented ecological threats, it is possible to relate the sense of existential dread conjured by a work like Sunset to the feeling that the Earth is in tumult. This is one of the more politically urgent undertones of Gornik’s purposefully depopulated scenes of nature. In this way, the Romantic motif of the sublime becomes refigured in Gornik’s work; the quality of dread that accompanies the motif becomes inflected by such ecological concerns. There is, thus, the sense that the majesty we observe is in peril. This quality of dread also extends to the color pale!e in Gornik’s works, which is naturalistic, but o"en slightly denatured, as in the harsh whites and yellows of Field. Another element that establishes an otherworldly feeling in Gornik’s paintings is her handling of skies. In many cases, the sky is a naturalistic, if o"en exuberant and tumultuous, element of the landscape. But in some paintings, the sky takes on a larger role—for example, when perspective is bent to allow us to feel as if we are simultaneously looking out at a land or water mass and upwards at rolling clouds. Sometimes the clouds themselves become the subject of the work, as in Moonlight, where Gornik plays with cropping to evoke the silvery quality of moonlight as it highlights the breaks in cloud cover, and also to make space ambiguous, playing with a fluctuating sense of snapping between flatness and depth that would not be out of place in a nonrepresentational abstract painting. This merger between the natural and the imagined is embedded in the sources of the works as well. It is easy to envision Gornik working en plein air, and yet—while she travels regularly and is indeed inspired from time to time by what she sees—she also looks at photographs and o"en

makes changes in a scene as she works it up into a painting. This is true even when a painting is based on something that Gornik in fact saw—and that impressed her at the time. Thus, she is less concerned with slavishly transcribing her observations than she is with allowing painterly concerns to take over during the process of painting, so she plays with color, form, and space. It is for this reason that we become a!uned to these layers and qualities in the work, as they are manifested in the aﬀectual resonances with which the work leaves us.

Gornik favors simple titles that are o"en short and descriptive, rather than illustrative—titles that indicate factual entities like place (i.e., Field), time (i.e., Sunset), and atmosphere (i.e., Moonlight). Her refusal to be more specific may give viewers a sense that her scenes are familiar. Her compositions are evocative, but a work like Field doesn’t suggest something we might have actually experienced as much as it suggests scenes with which we are familiar, through images that circulate in the media. Again, the feeling evoked by the paintings may not be conscious: The charged atmospheres of Gornik’s paintings are far from sensational, and we access landscapes like Field, which seems to be a view of an African savanna, through the lens of what we have seen in magazines and on television. Viewers haven’t visited many of the places evoked by the paintings, but they have seen images of them in the media. Although Gornik’s landscapes have a generalized sense of place, their exact derivation is not important, and is not consciously constructed by the artist. She is not painting any specific locale; nonetheless, our perception of a particular place, whether experienced in person or in images, gets projected onto the painting before us, and thus becomes part of our experience of the painting. Gornik moved to New York City in 1978, a pivotal moment in art history. At the time, it seemed to many that the death throes of modernism were giving way to a pluralism of artistic styles and

approaches. Photorealism was one of these. It had emerged earlier in the decade but still held sway when Gornik arrived in New York. The photographic elements of the more conceptually inflected 1960s works of artists like Gerhard Richter, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Malcolm Morley gave way by the end of the decade to the more technologically fetishistic works of artists like Ralph Goings and Richard Estes. These were also an international market sensation; the style was fashionable and widespread at the time. In the same moment, artists like Francesco Clemente and Julian Schnabel, who had a background in the conceptual practices that dominated in the early 1970s, were shi"ing toward more expressive, painterly modes that were suggestive, both in their subject ma!er and style, of earlier episodes in painting’s history. When she confronted these different possibilities for painting on the cusp of the 1980s, Gornik might have felt more affinity for photo-realism, but she was not willing to sacrifice the expressive potential being mined for painting by artists like Clemente and Schnabel, nor the conceptually inflected formal goals of other kinds of contemporaneous art. This is why Gornik’s landscapes are both sensorially evocative—and thus removed from photo-realism proper—and compositionally and technically complex. She eschews the obsession with surfaces and materials that were leading concerns of photorealists like Goings and Estes. Instead, as discussed earlier, the singular surface of photo-realism is ruptured in Gornik’s work, and is transformed instead into a variegated field populated by subtly different kinds of paint handling. A!endant to this is the problem of focus. In a typical photorealistic painting, the singular, hyper-realized surface, with its density of detail, almost rebuffs our close a!ention to it because of its overload of sensorial information. It proposes, in fact, to exceed the detail contained within a standard photograph. That so-called “photorealism” can be understood in some cases to almost exceed the photograph itself should be seen as a compensatory gesture for the increasing amount of information that photographs have facilitated since their invention in the nineteenth century. To note that this has only accelerated over time is an understatement, just as it is an

understatement to note that the persistence of the image within our visual economy—even as a means of display, circulation, and reception—has evolved drastically over the last century.

Gornik engages constructively with an omnipresent phenomenon: the way the digital world has reordered a!ention and distraction. For this is another way that one can interpret the varying kinds of brushwork and image making employed in her paintings. That parts of her paintings variously a!ract and disperse our a!ention as we behold them is akin to how we respond to the world around us. For we are not simply overstimulated, as some simplistic renderings of contemporary culture would have it; instead, we are presented with—in a way we always have been—diﬀerent zones in which to direct our a!ention. Indeed, with so many easily accessible options, how and where a person gives his or her limited store of time and a!ention is significant, to the point that it can even accrue political overtones. Given that so many things are competing for our a!ention, how we deploy it becomes significant. This question of a!ention brings us back to the central goal that Gornik expresses for her paintings: that of evoking a feeling of tension or unease in the viewer. We might understand Gornik’s paintings, generally speaking (despite the varying of focus inherent in her technique), to bring about, overall, a slowing down and questioning of our conventional distribution of a!ention. This can give rise to a feeling of tension in the viewer. Thus, we return to the beginning of this essay. To how the seemingly innocuous nature of the paintings quickly gives way to something far more complex. We can now see that this has the potential to facilitate a fundamental questioning of the ways that we see and experience the world. Gornik never does this in an overwhelming or masochistic way, however. She does it via markedly beautiful and dramatic landscapes that provide us with a way out of being engulfed by questions of a!ention and ina!ention, for at the same time they allow us to envision an alternate reality.

Alex Bacon is a Curatorial Associate at the Princeton University Art Museum. He is an art historian based in New York City who also regularly writes criticism and organizes exhibitions of both contemporary and historical art.

Ocean, 2017 Oil on linen 74 x 81 1⁄2 inches 188 x 207 cm

Big Storm Light,Â 2016 Oil on linen 70 x 77 inches 177.8 x 195.6 cm

Sunset,Â 2018 Oil on linen 72 x 108 inches 182.9 x 274.3 cm

Tropical Dri&,Â 2019

Oil on linen 75 x 100 inches 190.5 x 254 cm

Bending Light, 2019 Oil on linen 28 1â &#x201E;4 x 31 inches 71.8 x 78.7 cm

Spring Light and Still Water, 2016

Oil on linen 72 x 108 inches 182.9 x 274.3 cm

Field,Â 2019 Oil on linen 75 x 100 inches 190.5 x 254 cm

Slow Time, 2018 Oil on linen 32 x 24 inches 81.3 x 61 cm

Light Wheel, 2019 Oil on linen 80 1⁄2 x 62 inches 204.5 x 157.5 cm

Moon Behind Clouds, 2017

Oil on linen 23 x 32 inches 58.4 x 81.3 cm

Flower Moon Night, 2018

Oil on linen 30 x 40 inches 76.2 x 101.6 cm

Moonlight,Â 2019 Oil on linen 65 x 91 inches 165.1 x 231.1 cm

Sea of Light and Dark,Â 2019 Oil on linen 75 x 105 inches 190.5 x 266.7 cm

Storm Sweep, 2019

Oil on linen 64 x 80 inches 162.6 x 203.2 cm

Gloria Mundi,Â 2019 Charcoal on paper 37 1â &#x201E;2 x 50 inches 95.3 x 127 cm

Horizon Bent By Light, 2018 Charcoal and pastel on paper 44 1⁄8 x 37 7⁄8 inches 112.1 x 96.2 cm

Folding Unfolding Sky, 2018

Charcoal on paper 47 1⁄2 x 38 inches 120.7 x 96.5 cm

Horizon Gravity,Â 2018

Charcoal on paper 46 x 37 1â &#x201E;2 inches 116.8 x 95.3 cm

Traveling Shadowed Light, 2018 Charcoal on paper 41 3⁄4 x 46 inches 106 x 116.8 cm

Horizon Light,Â 2017 Charcoal on paper 38 x 50 inches 106.7 x 142.2 cm

Weighing the Ocean,Â 2018

Charcoal on paper 37 1â &#x201E;2 x 50 inches 95.3 x 127 cm

APRIL GORNIK Born in 1953 in Cleveland, Ohio Lives and works in Sag Harbor, NY

EDUCATION

2008 Danese Gallery, New York, NY 2006 Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH

1976 BFA, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Canada

2005 Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Canada Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, NE Danese Gallery, New York, NY

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2004 Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY

2020 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2003 Danese Gallery, New York, NY

2016 Danese/Corey Gallery, New York, NY

2002 Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV

2015 Pace Prints, New York, NY

2001 Danese Gallery, New York, NY

2014 Danese Gallery, New York, NY

2000 Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY

2013 Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH

1999 Glenn Horowitz Booksellers, East Hampton, NY Harley Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO

2012 Barbara Edwards Contemporary, Toronto, Canada 2011 Danese Gallery, New York, NY

1998 The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA

2009 Heckscher Museum, Huntington, NY

1997 Turner & Runyon Gallery, Dallas, TX

1996 Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY

1984 Texas Gallery, Houston, TX

1995 Kohn-Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

1983 The New Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH

1994 Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY Oﬀshore Gallery, East Hampton, NY

1983 Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY

1993 Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA Mary Ryan Gallery, New York, NY 1992 Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY

1990 Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY 1988 University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach, CA The Sable-Castelli Gallery, Toronto, Canada 1987 Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY 1986 Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY 1985 The Sable-Castelli Gallery, Toronto, Canada Galerie Springer, Berlin, Germany 1984 Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY

1982 Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY University of Colorado Art Galleries, Boulder, CO 1981 Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY

GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2019 “That 80s Show,” Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, NY “LandEscape,” Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY 2017 “Black & White,” Tripoli Gallery, Southampton, NY “Photography of Place,” Palm Beach Photographic Center Museum, West Palm Beach, FL 2016 “Water|Bodies,” Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, NY 2015 “Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection,” Portland Museum of Art, Sea!le, WA, traveled to The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA and Sea!le Art Museum, Sea!le, WA

“Frontiers Reimagined” (organized by Sundaram Tagore Gallery), Museo di Palazzo Grimani, 56th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy 2013 “The Beacon,” Salomon Contemporary, New York, NY “A Discourse on Plants,” RH Gallery, New York, NY 2011 “Bon a Tirer,” Barbara Edwards Gallery, Toronto, Canada “The Value of Water,” Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, NY “Works on Paper,” Danese Gallery, New York, NY “Delinear,” Barbara Edwards Gallery, Toronto, Canada “Joe Fig: Inside the Painter’s Studio,” Massachuse!s College of Art, Boston, MA “In the Presence of Light,” Danese Gallery, New York, NY 2010 “Works on Paper,” Danese Gallery, New York, NY “Gallery Dedication Group Show,” Charles P. Si"on Gallery, New York, NY 2009 “Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts,” American Academy of Arts and Le!ers, New York, NY “The Print Club of New York: Seventeen Years of Commissioned Prints,” The National Arts Club, New York, NY “Mixed Greens,” Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY “Then & Now: Contemporary Artists Revisit the Past,” Arkell Museum, Canajoharie, NY “Forces of Nature,” Danese Gallery, New York, NY “The Tree” James Cohan Gallery, Shanghai, China “American Landscapes: Treasures from the Parrish Art Museum,” Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY 2008 “Inspired by the Light: Landscapes by East End Masters,” Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY “From Here to the Horizon: American Landscape Prints from Whistler to Celmins,” Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ

2007 “Audacity in Art: Collector’s Choice III, Selected Works from Central Florida Collections,” Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL “Paper Trails: A Century of Women’s Prints, Drawings, and Photographs,” Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY “Monoprints,” Pace Prints, New York, NY “Picturing Long Island,” Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY 2006 “New Old Masters,” National Museum of Gdansk, Gdansk, Poland “Tapestries,” Sullivan Goss Gallery, Montecito, CA 2005 “Landscapes and Cityscapes,” Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY “The 237th Summer Exhibition,” Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom “Artists and Nature on Eastern Long Island: 1940s to the Present,” Spanierman Gallery, East Hampton, NY “Contemporary Woodblock Prints,” Yoshiaki Inoue Gallery, Osaka, Japan “Drawn to Cleveland,” Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH 2004 “Images of Time and Place: Contemporary Views of Landscape,” Lehman College Art Gallery, New York, NY “A Celebration of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Honorees in the Visual Arts,” Guild Hall Museum, Southampton, NY “North Fork/South Fork: East End Art Now,” Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY “Art from the Paris Review,” Guild Hall Museum, Southampton, NY “Graphic Masters: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum,” Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, traveled to Hunter Museum of American Art, Cha!anooga, TN; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY and Plains Art Museum, Fargo, ND “Temporalscape,” Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA

2003 “Graphic Masters: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum,” Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY 2002 “Curious Terrain,” Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, NY “Northern Light,” Danese Gallery, New York, NY “Darkness and Brightness,” Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York, NY 2001 “Inaugural Exhibition,” Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “The Private Collection of Steve Martin,” Bellagio Gallery, Las Vegas, NV “Follies,” Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY “Peaks,” Kagan Martos Gallery, New York, NY “Stormy Weather,” Steven Sco! Gallery, Baltimore, MD

2000 “Drawings 2000,” Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY “Art of the 80s,” Winston Wächter Mayer Fine Art, New York, NY “Group Landscape Exhibition,” Winston Wächter Fine Art, Sea!le, WA “Works on Paper 2000,” Residence of the American Ambassador of The Slovak Republic, Bratislava, Slovakia “The Perpetual Well: Contemporary Art from the Collection of the Jewish Museum,” Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL “Water: A Contemporary American View,” Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL and Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, WI 1999 “Water: A Contemporary American View,” Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC “Why Draw a Landscape?” Crown Point Press Gallery, San Francisco, CA and Karen McCready Gallery, New York, NY “A Place in the Sun,” Steven Sco! Gallery, Baltimore, MD “As Far as the Eye Can See,” Atlanta College of Art Gallery, Atlanta, GA 1998 “Encyclopedia,” Turner and Runyon Gallery, Dallas, TX “Gi"s for a New Century,” Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY “A"er Nature,” Herter Art Gallery, Amherst, MA

“New Releases: April Gornik, Tom Marioni, Pat Steir,” Crown Point Press Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Cityscape/Landscape,” Karen McCready Fine Art, New York, NY “80s Artists Then and Now,” Elizabeth Mayer Fine Art, New York, NY “Selections from the Collection: Guild Hall Museum,” Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY “Cleveland Collects,” The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH “The Joe Wilfer Show: Collaborations in Paper and Printmaking,” Pla!sburgh Art Museum, Pla!sburgh, NY “The Centennial Open,” Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY “Divining Nature,” Southeast Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC “Prints by Painters,” Paul Kuhn Gallery, Calgary, Canada “The Portraits Speak: Chuck Close in Conversation with 27 of his Subjects,” Dorfman Projects, New York, NY “Movements of Grace: Spirit in the American Landscape,” Winston Wächter Fine Art, New York, NY “Landscapes,” Meyerson & Nowinski, Sea!le, WA 1997 “In Plain Sight,” Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY “A Reversal of Scale,” Turner and Runyon Gallery, Dallas, TX “Woodwork,” Emily Fisher Landau Center, Long Island City, NY “Eight From Ohio: In and Out of Bounds,” Hammond Gallery, Lancaster, OH 1996 “Destiny Manifest: American Landscape Paintings in the Nineties,” Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL ”20/20: The Visionary Legacy of Doris Chanin Freedman,” Freedman Gallery, Albright College Center for the Arts, Reading, PA “Water,” James Graham & Sons, New York, NY “Master Workshop Exhibition,” Fine Arts Gallery at Southampton College, Southampton, NY 1995 “Re-Presenting Representation II,” Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY “Elementum,” Mary Ryan Gallery, New York, NY

“Revisiting Landscape,” California Center For the Arts, Escondido, CA “100 Personal Heroes Part 2,” Galerie de la Tour, Amsterdam, The Netherlands “American Art Today: Night Paintings,” Florida International University, Miami, FL 1994 “Inspired by Nature,” Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY “Changing Views,” Feigen Inc., Chicago, IL “Timely and Timeless,” Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT “Landscape Not Landscape,” Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, FL “Mountains of the Mind: American Mountain Landscape Painting from 1850 to the Present,” Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO 1993 “Living With Art: The Collection of Ellyn and Saul Dennison,” The Morristown Museum, Morristown, NJ “25 Years,” Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH “Landscape as Metaphor,” Eli Whitney Museum, Fitchburg, CT 1992 “Four Friends,” The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT, traveled to Rayburn Foundation, New York, NY; Ringling Museum, Sarasota, FL and Oklahoma Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, OK “Selective Vision,” Transamerica Pyramid Lobby, San Francisco, CA 1991 “Romance and Irony in Recent American Art,” Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY “Presswork: Art of Women Printmakers,” The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. “Landscapes,” Mary Ryan Gallery, New York, NY “Landscape Painting,” Annina Nosei Gallery, New York, NY 1990 “Terra Incognita,” Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI

“Contemporary American Artists,” Residence of the Ambassador, Mexico City, Mexico “The (Un)Making of Nature,” Whitney Downtown at Federal Reserve Plaza, New York, NY and Fairfield County, CT “Romance & Irony in Recent American Art,” The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia “Harmony & Discord: American Landscape Today,” Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA “Didier Nolet: Dreams of a Man Awake,” Chicago Public Library Cultural Center, Chicago, IL 1989 “10 + 10: Contemporary Soviet & American Painters,” Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX, traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buﬀalo, NY; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Artists’ Union Hall of the Tretyakov Embankment, Moscow, USSR; Central Artists’ Hall, Tbilisi, Georgia and Central Exhibition Hall, Leningrad, USSR “1989 Biennial Exhibition,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY “Painting Horizons: Jane Freilicher, Albert York, April Gornik,” Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY “A Decade of Drawings: 1980-1989,” Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “A Certain Slant of Light: The Contemporary American Landscape,” The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH “The 1980s: Prints from the Collection of Joshua P. Smith,” National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. “Nocturnal Visions in Contemporary Painting,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY “Art of the ‘80s from the Chemical Bank Collection,” The Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ “American Art Today: Contemporary Landscape,” The Art Museum at Florida International University, Miami, FL 1988 “Art for Your Collection,” Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI

“Drawing on the East End, 1940-1988,” Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY “Changing Perspectives in Contemporary Representations,” Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY “Realism Today: American Drawings from the Rita Rich Collection,” National Academy of Design, New York, NY, traveled to Smith College, Northampton, MA; The Arkansas Arts Center, Li!le Rock, AK and The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH 1987 “Art of the Twentieth Century,” Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH “The New Romantic Landscape,” The Whitney Museum of American Art, Fairfield Country Branch, Stamford, CT “1976-1986: Selections from the Edward R. Downe, Jr. Collection,” Wellesley College Museum, Wellesley, MA “Boundless Realism: Contemporary Landscape Painting in the West,” The Rockwell Museum, Corning, NY

1984 “Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained: American Visions of the New Decade,” United States Pavilion (organized by The New Museum of Contemporary Art), 41st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy, traveled to Lisbon, Portugal; Madrid, Spain; Athens, Greece; Belgrade, Yugoslavia and Budapest, Hungary “A Celebration of American Women Artists, Part II: The Recent Generation,” Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, NY “The Innovative Landscape,” Holly Solomon, New York, NY “A Tribute To James and Mari Michener,” Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, The University of Texas at Austin, TX

SELECT COLLECTIONS Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada

1986 “New Narrative Painting: Selections from The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ “A Contemporary View of Nature,” Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT “Art on Paper,” Weatherspoon Art Gallery, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC “Spectrum, Natural Se!ings,” Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. “Still Life/Life Still,” Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Public and Private: American Prints Today,” 24th National Print Exhibition, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY “Landscape in the Age of Anxiety,” Lehman College Art Gallery, New York, NY

Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX

1985 “American Painting 1975-1985: Selections from the Collection of Aron and Phyllis Katz,” The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO “Night Lights,” The Ta" Museum, Cincinnati, OH “Currents,” Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA “Sources of Light,” The Henry Art Gallery, Sea!le, WA

Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME

Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, NY Castellani Art Museum, Niagara University, Lewiston, NY Cincinnati Museum, Cincinnati, OH City College of New York, New York, NY Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH

Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH

Douglas S. Cramer Foundation, Los Angeles, CA

New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA

Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY

Fisher Landau Center for Art, New York, NY

Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX

Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY

Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN

Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN

Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY

Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY

United States Embassy, Beijing, China

Henry Art Gallery, Sea!le, WA

United States Embassy, Moscow, Russia

High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA

University Gallery, University of Massachuse!s, Amherst, MA

Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV

University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach, CA

Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

The Jewish Museum, New York, NY

William and Florence Schmidt Art Center, Belleville, IL

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

APRIL!GORNIK 20 February – 28 March 2020 Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2020 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2019 Alex Bacon Director of Publications Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue layout by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-25-0 Cover: Sunset, (detail), 2018