Eric Fischl & April Gornik

April Gornik

Artist April Gornik’s paintings and drawings of land, sky and sea are anchored in observed reality and a world synthesized, abstracted, remembered and imagined. They offer the viewer an opportunity to explore dichotomies between past and present, expanse and its circumscription, intimacy in immensity, stillness and the inexorable momentum of atmospheric change. Her canvases – roiling seas, brewing skies, mountains and endless plains – internalize and engage nature’s proscenium. In these captured moments, the natural world triumphs and the mirror of time stares back.

Her work may be found in the public collections of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Cincinnati Museum, Cincinnati, OH; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Fisher Landau Center, Long Island City, NY; Fort Worth Museum, Fort Worth, TX; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN; Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; 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.; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ; Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY; Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; United States Embassy, Beijing, China; United States Embassy, Moscow, Russia; University Gallery, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.

Eric Fischl

Eric Fischl was born in New York in 1948. He graduated from the California Institute of Arts in Valencia, in 1972, and was a teacher between 1974 and 1978 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. Fischl had his first solo show, curated by Bruce W. Ferguson, at Dalhousie Art Gallery in Nova Scotia in 1975 before relocating to New York City in 1978.

Fischl works in multiple mediums such as painting, sculpture and prints, and is mostly known for his large scale, naturalistic images of middle-class American life. His suburban upbringing provided him with a backdrop of alcoholism and a culture obsessed with image over content. Subsequently, his early work became focused on provocative yet truthful issues deemed repugnant by polite society. The powerful underlying sexuality in his works, often portray intimate moments that the viewer is helplessly made privy of and address the dark and disturbing undercurrents of mainstream American life. Fischl’s large human-scale figures only emphasize the voyeuristic feeling of his images, and imbue them with a psychological, almost dream-like intensity. His earlier paintings are highly reminiscent of the Photorealism works of the 1960s, and during the 1980s his style expanded to fragmented images split into separate panels, which he used for paintings and etchings.

Eric Fischl has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe. He is held in the collections and had exhibitions in major institutions such as the The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée Beaubourg in Paris, France; and the The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Fischl’s work has been featured in over one thousand publications.