Landscape by Diane Burko

An exhibition of Philadelphia-based artist Diane Burko works, "Landscapes: Paint/Pixel," will take place in the Rider University Art Gallery Thursday, January 27 through Friday, February 25.

On January 27 from 5 to 7:30 p.m., an opening reception will take place at the Gallery, located on the top floor of the Bart Luedeke Center on Rider's Lawrenceville campus. Burko will give a gallery talk about her work on Thursday, February 3 at 7 p.m. Both the reception and talk are free and open to the public.

A foremost landscape painter, Burko celebrates the wilderness in panoramic views of the Grand Canyon, Himalayan peaks, and the coastlines of California, Maine, and France - and on a more intimate scale, the cultivation of nature found in parks and gardens such as Monet's in Giverny. For more than 30 years, she has been guided by her ability to investigate actual locations, to confront its vistas, observe the skies, air, soil and vegetation as well as bodies of water. For the past five years, she has been investigating the geological phenomena of volcanoes. Such journeys have taken her most recently to Iceland, Italy, Hawaii, Alaska, and Costa Rica.

This is the first time Burko is publicly showing her inkjet prints. The works on paper are digitally manipulated photographs taken from airplanes and helicopters over many of the landscapes which she has also painted.

Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1945, Burko graduated from Skidmore College in 1966 where she double majored in art history and painting. She continued her study of painting, earning an MFA in 1969 from the Graduate School of Fine Arts of the University of Pennsylvania.

Burko has exhibited extensively throughout the country. She is represented in Philadelphia by the Locks Gallery. She has received numerous grants and awards such as the generous Bessie Berman Award from the Leeway Foundation, two National Endowment for the Arts Grants, as well as two Individual Artist grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She has also been awarded residencies in Giverny, France, from the Lila Acheson Wallace Foundation and at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Her work is in numerous public collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The James A. Michener Museum, Doylestown, PA; The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and The Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m.

For further information, call (609) 895-5588.