Andrew Reed Gallery is excited to announce Sinking Feeling, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of work by Toronto-born, Miami-based artist Nicole Burko. The show opens this Saturday, May 31st with an opening reception from 6-8pm and will be on view through July 3rd. 

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In her immersive oil paintings, Burko draws from her personal experiences of freediving into underwater caverns on a single breath. Through gestural brushwork, transparent layers, fluid strokes, and sweeping sfumato, Burko blurs the line between abstraction and representation. Her technique evokes pareidolia—the tendency to see shapes or objects in ambiguous forms—transforming indecipherable spaces into scenes shaped by the mind's interpretations. While in several of Burko’s paintings, a horizon line is seemingly visible, suggesting a seaside nocturne, these scenes are all depicted from underwater, moments Burko has experienced on her dives. The artist invites this ambiguity. 

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Consumed, one of Burko’s largest works to date, immerses us in a luminous, monochromatic underwater cavern, similar to those found in northern Florida. Burko’s mark-making evokes the erosion of stone by water, with swirling gestures that mirror sediment and the sky above. The softness in the work suggests the murky distance of an underwater realm. Indeed, Burko is capturing her experience of traversing the depths of these underwater topographical features and the sense of distortion – both of light and space – which results. In Threshold, the light emanates above, calling to mind Mark Rothko’s ‘multiforms.’  The looseness of Burko’s brushwork invites viewers to complete the image in their minds, much like gazing at clouds, while the chaos and calm of her compositions reflect the simultaneous beauty and terror of the underwater landscape. 

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In Sinking Feeling, five 12 x 12 inch and four slightly larger compositions are installed opposite one another. The one-foot-square works are generally of a brighter palette; the works across are more restrained.  In Spiral and Light-Hearted, rapturous moments of light puncture the rose and crimson atmospheric gradients. Opposite, a central orb casts a glow through the clouds in Narcissus. While the darkened outskirts of the painting initially point towards a nightscape, the tinges of red and yellow suggest otherwise. Burko again astutely probes this vagueness, encouraging us to look and draw our own conclusions, or even fall back to taking in the abstraction without further inference.