At the heart of Diane Burko’s retrospective exhibition at the American University Museum, in Washington, D.C., is a painting entitled “Unprecedented” (2021). Eight feet high and 15 wide, it is filled with billowing expanses of white, black, and red. Punctuating these clouds of color are discs of various sizes, floating forms that suggest planets in complex orbits. Scale in this painting is vast — and familiar, for Burko’s “Unprecedented” belongs in the company of Barnett Newman’s “Vir Heroicus Sublimis” (1950–51), Clyfford Still’s overbearing slabs of dark pigment, and other big paintings in Abstract Expressionism’s heroic tradition. Yet Burko’s painting is not entirely at home in that company.
Still once wrote to a friend, “When I expose a painting I would have it say: ‘Here I am; this is my feeling, my presence, myself.’” In the same spirit, Newman declared that his subject was “the self, terrible and constant.” Their art, as they saw it, was all about them. Burko’s art is about us — rather, about the environmental disaster we are all spiraling into. The title of her retrospective, curated by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, is Seeing Climate Change. The curators could just as well have called it Feeling Climate Change, for Burko’s images of melting glaciers and dying coral reefs are not just pictorially impressive; they have strong emotional impact.
