NEW YORK, NY.- Miles McEnery Gallery announced an exhibition of new paintings by April Gornik, on view at 525 West 22nd Street from 2 April through 9 May 2026. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Richard Deming. The opening reception will take place on Thursday, 9 April, from 6:00 - 8:00 PM at 525 West 22nd Street.

While Gornik is widely recognized for her epic, large-scale landscapes, this exhibition also reveals the potency of her vision at a more intimate scale. Alongside the sweeping compositions that have long defined her practice, the artist presents seven more modestly scaled paintings, six of which are rendered in a richly minimal, almost grisaille palette and were created during a deeply personal moment in the artist’s life.

In this new body of work, Gornik advances her decades-long engagement with landscape and her goal of relocating emphasis from depiction to encounter. The artist uses shifts in the works’ scale to encourage new kinds of suggestion and engagement, relying on emotional experience to create “place.” Fields, skies, rivers, and expanses of water unfold without human figures or narrative cues, inviting viewers to locate themselves within the act of looking itself.

As Deming writes, “Our eyes take part in the work of Gornik’s art. They move and shift and turn as our gaze travels over the paintings. The images may seem like still scenes, ripe for meditation, but instead they are opportunities for attention. There is no human subject within the paintings, but we provide that, standing in front of them.” In this way, Gornik’s compositions do not dictate a single path through space; they remain open, allowing each viewer’s perception to determine where to begin and how long to remain.

Through this sustained engagement, Gornik’s works give form to Deming’s assertion that “A painting isn’t actually a moment, either. It is an insight built up over time—one arrived at by layers of paint, countless brushstrokes and blotting, all coursing over the weave of the canvas. If anything, it is a revelation of our own threaded experiences of psychology, emotion, and corporality—of how we are as bodies and beings in a world ever in flux. Thus, one of the things we are seeing when we look at a landscape painting is an artist’s sustained commitment to witnessing and to making that experience available—not despite the limitations of paintings but because of them.”

April Gornik (b. 1953 in Cleveland, OH) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada. Since then, Gornik has gone on to become one of the foremost figures of contemporary American landscape painting, having exhibited at the 1989 Whitney Biennial and both the 41st and 56th editions of the Venice Biennale. In 2021, she cofounded The Church, an innovative artist residency and exhibition space in Sag Harbor, NY.

Gornik has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Canada; Barbara Edwards Contemporary, Toronto, Canada; Danese/Corey Gallery, New York, NY; Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH; The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; Pace Prints, New York, NY; and the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, NE.

Her work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions including the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Gornik’s work may be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.

The artist lives and works in Sag Harbor, NY.