APRIL GORNIK

"Our eyes take part in the work of Gornik’s art. They move, shift, and turn as our gaze travels over the paintings. The images may initially seem like still scenes, ripe for meditation, but instead they are opportunities for attention. There is no human subject within the paintings. But by standing in front of them, we provide that. We are there and not there in the field, at the edge of the water, eyes cast skyward. In the end—or maybe I should say from the beginnin —April Gornik’s paintings aren’t haunted spaces so much as events that allow us to haunt them. We see and linger, our gaze quickened by what becomes visible, little by little."

- Richard Deming in "How to Do Things With the Landscape: The Paintings of April Gornik"

APRIL GORNIK (b. 1953 in Cleveland, OH) 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 cofounded The Church, an innovative artist residency and exhibition space in Sag Harbor, NY.

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

Her work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions including the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Gornik’s work may be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.

The artist lives and works in Sag Harbor, NY.

ARTIST INTERVIEW

BY Hearne Pardee

1 APRIL 2026

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