Low Relief

Slag Gallery is pleased to present Low Relief, Avital Burg’s new solo exhibition.

Avital Burg is best known for her dreamy still-lives and self-portraits. In these new paintings one can find a postcard of a Piero painting taped to a peeling brick wall, a broken gilded frame, a used paper coffee cup and a clay diorama of a Pompeii fresco. This seemingly random group of images in fact carries a sense of immediate and personal symbolism. They also hint at specific art history references and allusions to Burg’s past. In Low Relief, Burg meditates on the current moment through the passage of time, particularly on what it means to spend time making and looking at painting in today’s world.

The surface quality achieved by Burg’s inventive impasto technique becomes her way of transcending the nostalgia imbued in these paintings. It is also her vessel for moving forward and looking ahead. With each piece, Burg deliberately creates multiple layers of paint mixing dry oil paint with leftovers from other works into fresh paint, sometimes painting over older works themselves. In this process she reflects on how the present can encapsulate different times, while also striving to offer an emotional pause to the viewers. Utilizing color in a straightforward way to create cropped compositions, Burg crafts a hybrid history of different times and places, not unlike her own migratory path.

Avital Burg graduated from the New York Studio School in 2013, with additional studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, School of figurative drawing and painting “Hatahana” in Tel Aviv, and the Bezalel academy of art & design in Jerusalem. She has exhibited extensively in New York and Tel Aviv, including Rothchild Fine Art (Tel Aviv), Brooklyn Fire Proof (NY), Slag Gallery (NY), Club Caltural Matienzo (Buenos Aires), Volta 12 (Basel), The Spaceship (Tel Aviv) Rema Hort Mann Foundation (NY), Life on Mars Gallery (NY), Hanina Gallery (Tel Aviv), Islip Art Museum (NY), Hudson & Laight Gallery (NY), and Greenpoint Film Festival (NY). Avital Burg currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.