Virga

Date: 1992
 * [[image:https://s3.amazonaws.com/saam.media/files/styles/x_large/s3/images/2013/2013.88.4_1a.jpg?itok=SPaIZKJT width="282" height="331" link="@https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/virga-86646"]] || Title: **Virga**

Artist: **April Gornik** Born: Cleveland, Ohio 1953

Medium: oil on linen Dimensions: 90 x 76 in. (228.6 x 193.0 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of the James F. Dicke Family © 1992, April Gornik

Accession: 2013.88.4 || April Gornik has been painting dramatic, unpeopled landscapes for over thirty years. Painted on linen at human scale, Gornik’s landscapes are inventions of imagination. They depict a world she has seen and experienced, but that is mediated through memory and emotion. Gornik’s work is strongly influenced by nineteenth-century landscape traditions, however, unlike painters Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, Gornik does not want the viewer to feel overwhelmed by the scene. Rather, she “wants the paintings to be interactive, and provide an interface between how a painting is experienced and how nature is experienced.” Gornik’s pictures open toward the viewer, drawing us in to the heart of the landscape until the viewer can almost feel the temperature and humidity of the air.
 * About the Artwork: **

The proposed acquisition is a monumental, luminous painting. As in most of Gornik’s work, menacing storm clouds dominate the canvas, looming over an impossibly placid body of water. Low-lying mountains undulate along the horizon. The pale yellow sky is both bright and brooding, suffusing the scene with strange acidic glow. The title, //Virga//, describes a meteorological phenomenon in which precipitation falls from a cloud but evaporates before reaching the ground. Gornik was drawn to this unusual weather condition because it is simultaneously rain and not rain. This is one of many dichotomies that Gornik explores in her work. Her aim is for the landscapes to look as naturalistic as possible while simultaneously revealing the artifice of painting. Similarly, the places she depicts are intended to feel familiar yet foreign, intimate yet remote, real and also surreal. She hopes that viewers will identify with the unnamed settings and locate themselves in the picture.

Gornik had her first solo exhibition at the Edward Thorp Gallery in New York in 1981. Since then, she has exhibited in dozens of venues in the United States and Canada. Her most recent solo exhibition venues include: Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio; Barbara Edwards Contemporary in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; the Danese Gallery in New York City; and the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New York. She is married to America’s renowned narrative painter, Eric Fischl, with whom she resides in Sag Harbor on Long Island.


 * Resources: **

Storm and Fires, 1990, charcoal and pastel on paper, 47 1/8 x 38 1/4 inches
 * Other Works in the Collection: **

SAAM Collections Page Webcast of Artist Talk with April Gornik, Tuesday, April 1, 2014 Virga Wikipedia Entry
 * Links: **