The landscape paintings of W. Carl Burger, one of New Jersey’s leading artists and professor emeritus of art at Kean University, will be featured in the exhibition, “Watercolors: New Jersey Landscapes,” Thursday, January 25 through Thursday, February 22 at the Rider University Art Gallery.

An opening reception will be held on January 25 from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Gallery, located on the top floor of the Bart Luedeke Center on Rider’s Lawrenceville campus. The artist will give a talk about his work on Thursday, February 1 at 7 p.m. at the Gallery. Both the reception and talk are free and open to the public.

“Burger’s landscape images are powerful and provocative,” said Harry I Naar, professor of fine arts and director of the Rider University Art Gallery. “The exhibition at Rider highlights Burger’s love and desire to create innovative images that speak to the beauty and dazzling color and shapes that exist within the landscape. His images become our 21st century response to the Romantics of the 19th century. Burger is considered one of New Jersey’s most important artists.”

Born in Pforzheim, Germany in 1925, Burger and his family emigrated to the United States in 1926. After a tour of duty in World War II with the U.S. Army’s 1651st Engineer Utilities Detachment, he served with Military Intelligence in France and Germany. Honorably discharged in 1946, he pursued his education receiving a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in fine arts from New York University. From there, he took postgraduate courses at Columbia University, Rutgers University and Parsons School of Design.

Currently a professor emeritus at Kean University, Burger was a professor of art at Kean College (now Kean University) from 1961 until his retirement in 1993. He has also served as an adjunct professor at the County College of Morris.

Burger has exhibited widely throughout the United States in such venues as the National Academy Museum in New York City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Morris Museum in Morristown, the Montclair Art Museum, the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton and the Noyes Museum of Art in Oceanville. His work is included in numerous collections, including those of AT&T, Chubb Corp., Ortho Pharmaceuticals and British Airways.

Burger was presented The David L. Yunich Award from the pioneer and legendary surrealist painter, Marcel Duchamp, during the early ’60s for an exhibition of contemporary New Jersey art. Said Naar: “The late painter Clarence H. Carter wrote, ‘W. Carl Burger is an artist of ideas who has the technical skill to express them in the most masterful ways.’”

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. For further information, call 609-896-5588.

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