‘The Other Side’ of April Gornik

“The Other Side,” an exhibition featuring the paintings of Sag Harbor’s April Gornik, will be on view at Miles McEnery Gallery in Manhattan from September 7 through October 21.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Annie Godfrey Larmon.

Over the course of her nearly four-decade career, 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, 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, Gornik thrusts the viewer into her dramatic panoramas, forcing viewers to reckon with the sublimity of creation, the power of our changing climate and the inevitability of our own mortality.

Above all, 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, Ohio) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada. Since then, 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 co-founded The Church, an innovative artist residency and exhibition space in Sag Harbor.

Gornik has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Miles McEnery Gallery, Danese/Corey Gallery and Pace Prints, all in New York City; Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio; Barbara Edwards Contemporary, Toronto, Canada; Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Canada; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York.

Her work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions and Gornik’s work may be found in the collections of many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, all in New York City, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Miles McEnery Gallery is at 525 West 22nd Street, New York City. For details, visit milesmcenery.com.