Avital Burg's Mercurial Flower Show in Los Angeles

"TG Adar Wild Chamomile" (2026), Avital Burg / oil and oil sticks on linen

By LYLE ZIMSKIND May 9th, 2026

There’s a kind of charming disconnect between the name and the experience of Brooklyn-based painter Avital Burg’s current exhibition at Nazarian Curcio in Los Angeles. From A Passing Shadow and a Vanishing Cloud we might have expected a sense of quietude, a minimalist display of images that revealed their expressive essence only after an extended moment of contemplation. But what hit us as soon as we made our way into that gallery room was something much more immediately sensational. Something less like a passing shadow or a vanishing cloud and more like a fireworks show.

Because these are fourteen really bold paintings.

Though each one presents a still life of wildflowers foraged from a sidewalk or parking lot in the different spots around Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood that give the works their individual titles, the images are not static. Thick textural applications of paint vividly jut out from the same surfaces that in other areas reveal underlying preliminary layers never painted over at all. (Most often these prior painting exercises that peek through into the final compositions are simple abstractions; in one of them, though, it’s a disembodied leg so effectively camouflaged within the overall tableau that a passing viewer might not even notice it.)

As Burg describes them, her paintings are not snapshots, but more like time exposures capturing brief mini-seasons when the particular flora she’s collected for display are primed to flourish. While she was working on any one of them, she may have gone out and found new, fresher plant specimens to add or replace in the arrangement she’d already started capturing. In the manner of classic still life compositions, then, these works convey the inexorable flux and the fleeting lifespan of her subjects with a single image. But there’s also so much activity implicit in nearly all of the pieces that they burst our expectations of the form.

"Utica Ave. Kislev Goldenrod" (2025-2026), Avital Burg / oil, oil pastels and charcoal on linen

On our first visit to the show, it was the represented floral arrangements that instantly grabbed us, particularly in certain images where Burg’s deft impasto technique creates a kind of reverse trompe l’oeil effect. Budding berries along a thin branch all look the same from across the room (as well as in the online reproductions), but while some of these fruits are formed in flat pigment on the painting’s linen surface, others are globules of oil paint that could practically be picked right off it. In another painting rough streaks representing additionally layered bright yellow flower petals spill off over its two-dimensional side. Elsewhere a leaf is created not in an application of paint, but an empty unpainted space that forms the image.

When we went back to the gallery for a second look, what struck us more than the subjects of these pieces were the powerfully ambiguous environments in which Burg memorializes their temporal existence. Other than some seasonal suggestions in a few of the titles, there is no indicator of the world we know and inhabit surrounding any of these flower arrangements.

In a painting like “Dean Street Pompom Tree Flowers,” the displayed plant life seems to emerge out of some kind of ethereal explosion. The team of bulbs in “WF Flowers and Mushroom” looks like it’s escaping from a darkness still looming behind it. If there’s a hint of foreboding in these backgrounds, that sense is also mitigated by Burg’s fanciful choice to leave some spaces at the canvas’s margins unpainted and uncovered by the enveloping ether.

Install view

Behind the flora in some other paintings is an intensely chromatic void that also shares the field with areas of the canvas largely untouched by brush or painting knife. In still others, swirls of white, black or gray mingle with brighter streaks of colors that seem to be hiding until some appropriate time to emerge may arrive. Above a spread of daisies in “TG Adar Wild Chamomile,” thick, colorful strokes of paint—some vivid, some shadowy—burst into the air and expand to fill the upper space, with only a blank white linen painting surface representing some manner of infinity behind them.

Almost every one of the pieces in this show is named after a particular neighborhood street or landmark where the Jerusalem-born artist found these flowers before bringing them back to serve as still life models for painting in her studio, another specific place. And yet one of the remarkable features of all these images is that, as far as we can tell, they are located nowhere at all—not in a room or a city or a garden or any discernable spot—and their subjects share space with no one.

"Pacific Street Dogwood" (2025), Avital Burg / oil and oil pastels on linen

Burg’s wildflowers and their atmospheric surroundings are brilliant to look at. A sense of the brevity, yes, but also the silent intensity, of these specimens’ existence is palpably heightened by the varying applications of color and texture on the paintings’ surfaces. Almost any one of them alone would be striking. This collection lining the four walls of a small gallery room generates a highly satisfying sensory overload.  Sometimes a bunch of flowers is nothing more than a whole universe.