Avital Burg: A passing shadow and a vanishing cloud

Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to present A passing shadow and a vanishing cloud, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Israeli-born, Brooklyn-based artist Avital Burg. This marks Burg’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Through a series of still life paintings, Burg examines temporality and impermanence through sustained observation and an intimate engagement with organic materials gathered from the urban landscape and arranged within the studio.

The exhibition’s title is drawn from a line in a poem recited during the Jewish High Holidays, in which human experience is described as fleeting: “Like broken shards, like dry grass, and like a withered flower; like a passing shadow and a vanishing cloud, like a breeze that passes, like dust that scatters.” Burg’s paintings echo this reflection on transience by making such fleeting changes perceptible as they unfold over time.

The works in the exhibition consider time through two overlapping cycles. The first is seasonal, focusing on plants that emerge during specific moments of the year. The second unfolds on a daily scale: Burg paints the same arrangements over extended periods, registering subtle shifts in color, structure, and form as the plants gradually change before her. Through this durational process, the paintings hold traces of time within the fixed surface of the canvas.

Burg’s practice begins outside the studio. She gathers natural materials growing along the streets between her home and her Brooklyn studio: wildflowers, weeds, and branches that persist within the city’s built environment. These plants, which appear only during particular seasons, are brought into the studio and arranged before the artist begins painting from life. The titles of the paintings reference the specific neighborhoods and streets where the plants were first encountered.

The resulting works function as painterly field notes. Layers of oil paint accumulate gradually, recording the shifting micro-seasons of each plant while emphasizing the tactile presence of the painted surface. Burg’s work engages the long history of still life painting, a genre that has often used flowers and other perishable forms to reflect on the passage of time. In her paintings, this tradition is extended through duration: the subject continues to change as the painting is made, condensing weeks of observation into a single image. 

Materiality plays a central role in Burg’s process. Akin to low-relief surfaces, the paintings accumulate physical depth as dried fragments of oil paint from the artist’s palette are folded back into fresh pigment. Some canvases are painted over earlier works, while in others bare linen reveals traces left when the artist wipes her brush at the end of a day’s work. These surfaces register both the physicality of painting and the layered time of their making.

Born in Jerusalem and now based in Brooklyn, Burg approaches the urban landscape with a sensitivity to the flora that persist in demanding environments. In both cities, vegetation survives in marginal spaces: between stones, along sidewalks, or through cracks in pavement. By gathering these overlooked plants and bringing them into the studio, Burg elevates modest forms of urban growth into subjects of careful study. Through patient observation and materially layered surfaces, the paintings render visible the slow transformations of season, light, and growth -changes that become perceptible only with time.