An influential member the New York art scene since the late 1970s, April Gornik is known for her powerfully evocative large-scale landscapes. Highly atmospheric and charged with energy, Gornik’s depopulated scenes of oceans, mountains, forests and prairies—all under luminous skies—are not copies of nature. Unlike painters of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School, to which she is often compared, Gornik uses photography, rather than direct observation, to help create her imagery. She selects elements from different photographs, manipulating them digitally and forming a collage or composite of a landscape as she sees it.

 

The resulting scenes invite seeming recognition without pinpointing, since they are at once somewhere and nearly anywhere, and show nothing man-made. They are, essentially, landscapes of the mind, reminding the viewer that nature knows no borders, and that even natural boundaries and shorelines are subject to continual erosion. Gornik coaxes viewers to have an immersive, physical and emotional response informed by their own experience.

 

April Gornik trained at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Canada. Her work is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of American Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. From August 2004 to February 2005, Gornik was honored with an exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York. Gornik’s work was also included in the 1999 Whitney Biennial and in 1984 was in the American Pavilion at the 41st International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia.

 

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, 1953 | Lives and works in New York