Crean & Company announces its first-ever physical gallery exhibition, focusing on the latest body of work by Brooklyn-based contemporary painter Avital Burg. Opening during Frieze Week and running at Browse & Darby between 12 October and 3 November, Textures of Time marks Burg’s first ever solo show in the UK with a new series of still lifes and portraits. 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 work contemplates 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 a particular moment in the artist’s life. Interested in the material possibilities of paint, Burg uses oils and wax, giving a three-dimensional quality to her work – each ephemeral moment rendered with an often-lifelike materiality. 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’. This gives her work a sculptural quality that re-energises the potential of the observational genre in contemporary painting.
Burg trained in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, as well as London’s Slade School of Art and the New York Studio School, and her work reflects the artistic history and influence of these different cities around the world. The exhibition will present 26 new still life and observational paintings.
Avital Burg: Textures of Time is a Crean & Company exhibition in association with Browse & Darby.
