Avital Burg

Standing on Cardboard

February 28, 2014 to April 06, 2014

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STANDING ON CARDBOARD

AVITAL BURG

Slag Gallery is pleased to present STANDING ON CARDBOARD , a solo show featuring recent paintings by Avital Burg.

In this body of work Avital Burg addresses her relationship to her family's roots and the history of painting, transforming what can often feels distant and remote into something immediate and personal. Growing up in the Middle East, with her ancestors' European past over a thousand miles away, Burg has immersed herself as a child into the European tales about kings and queens. At the age of reflection, as her involvement with painting matured, the make-believe games of her childhood evolved into a deep interest in European Renaissance and Baroque painting.

Today, in Burg's Brooklyn studio, she constructs imaginative dioramas of interiors, castles, and ferries wheels using cardboard, clay, and tape. She does not attempt to hide the artificial, handmade qualities of these models -- they remain somewhat childish, as if taken from a dysfunctional theater set. The clumsiness of Burg's props expresses the inherent difficulty of replicating, or truly relating to, a past world. And yet, the process of painting provides a way to transcend that difficulty, enabling a living conversation with the past. Reminiscence and mystery imbues Burg’s images, familiar objects transcend into the symbolic and cast a glance back to legends and traditions. The spirit is inherent in Burg’s intellectual construction and the odyssey within oneself permeates her entire body of work.

Together, these works express Burg's longing to live in a portable world, small but with no boundaries, just like painting itself.

Avital Burg studied painting at New York Studio School (2013), Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK (2012), Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Israel (2008) and Hatahhana School of Figurative Painting and Drawing, Tel Aviv (2010).

Burg’s exhibitions include: Knock Me Over with a Feather, The Spaceship Gallery, Tel Aviv; Little Boxes, Graduate Exhibition, New York Studio School Gallery; Plaster, Jaffa; Ouchi Gallery, Brooklyn, NY ; Group Drawing Exhibition, Rotchild Fine Art, Tel Aviv; Bread and Roses, Kastiel, Tel Aviv; Greenpoint Film Festival, Brooklyn, NY; Hudson & Laight Gallery, Hudson, NY; News Painting , Hanina Gallery, Tel Aviv.

Additional images and information can be found on the artist's pages:

Avital Burg