Avital Burg b. 1985

Avital Burg’s paintings begin with acts of gathering and observation. Walking between her home and studio in Brooklyn, Burg collects wildflowers, weeds, and branches growing through the city’s built environment—plants that emerge briefly within particular seasons before disappearing again. Brought into the studio and painted from life, these modest forms become records of both place and duration, with titles referencing the streets and neighborhoods where they were first encountered.

Working within the tradition of still life painting, Burg approaches her subjects as evolving temporal studies rather than fixed compositions. Layers of oil paint accumulate gradually as the plants continue to wilt, bloom, and transform during the painting process, condensing weeks of observation into a single image. Thickened surfaces, built from dried fragments of paint folded back into fresh pigment, give the works a low-relief physicality in which traces of previous paintings, exposed linen, and marks left from wiping brushes remain visible. These layered surfaces register both the material weight of painting and the accumulated time embedded within it.

Born in Jerusalem and based in Brooklyn, Burg is attentive to the forms of vegetation that persist within dense urban environments—flowers growing through cracks in pavement, along sidewalks, or between stones. Through sustained observation and materially rich surfaces, her paintings elevate these overlooked forms into quiet meditations on growth, impermanence, and the slow transformations of season and light.

Avital Burg (b.1985, Jerusalem, Israel) attended the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, “Hatahana” school of figurative drawing and painting, Tel Aviv, The Slade School of Art, London, and the New York Studio School. Avital Burg has had solo exhibitions at Nazarian / Curcio, Los Angeles, CA; Fridman Gallery, New York, NY; Browse & Darby in association with Crean and Company, London, UK; Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; Slag Gallery, New York, NY; and Neve Schechter Gallery, Tel Aviv, ISR. Her work was part of two-person exhibitions at Arts at AJU, Los Angeles, and Club Caltural Matienzo, Buenos Aires. Avital Burg was recently included in group shows at Nazarian / Curcio, Los Angeles, CA, the Islip Art Museum, NY, Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY, among other venues. The artist was awarded residencies by the Salonstall Foundation for the arts, Interlude Residency, and received the Artis Residency Grant in 2022.  Burg's works are part of several collections, including Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection, NY; The Bank Leumi art collection, Israel; and Dov Shiff collection, Florida.