Diane Burko’s Bearing Witness at Cristin Tierney Gallery combines mixed-media paintings shaped by her experiences in extreme environments—glaciers, coral reefs, deserts, and rainforests. She has engaged with the shifting landscape for fifty years, responding to the accelerating changes that threaten these places. This marks a significant moment in her career—her first solo exhibition in New York in over forty years and her debut at Cristin Tierney Gallery.
Two of the larger-scale paintings in the show, Glacier Map and Reef Map 1 were developed in parallel and painted on opposite walls of her studio, a process that led Burko to uncover how they link. Reef Map 1 (2019), a rectangular acrylic painting with collage elements, features a narrow map along the top, revealing fragments of climate data. Below, the bulk of the painting is dominated by a potent swirl of yellow, red, green, and blue bursting into a vivid cloud within the turquoise and blue ocean—scientific charts scramble and dissolve into a disintegrating landscape. The underlying layer extends the imagery while simultaneously creating a subtle frame, stirring a sense of space within a space where landscape, topography, and data converge. The painting likely alludes to the destruction caused by rising ocean temperatures and coral bleaching, but its potency derives from its rich, painterly layers.