Natalya Burd

About the artist:

Natalya Burd has traveled extensively across Europe, Asia, South America, and North America, fueled by her passion for the natural world. Her experiences camping and hiking in national parks, forests, preserves, and wilderness areas throughout the United States have inspired her immersive installations. Trained as a painter, Burd created an innovative approach to her work by fabricating dimensional constructions of hand-painted foliage on colored Plexiglas and mirrors. The reflective qualities of these materials dissolve the boundaries of conventional flat surfaces, enveloping viewers in the shimmering atmosphere of a leafy orchard or evoking the experience of frothy waves cascading onto the sand. Working at a large scale, she plays with illusion and juxtaposition, contrasting the artifice and fragility of a constructed, technical, and digital reality with the organic character of the natural world. 

Born in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, Burd emigrated to the United States in 1996. She holds MFA degrees from the University of Washington, Seattle and the Moscow Academy of Art and Industrial Design in Moscow, Russia. Burd has lived and worked in the Bay Area for the past twenty years while exhibiting nationally and internationally. In 2016, she received a Visual Artist Laureate Award from SVCreates, and in 2017, was awarded residency fellowship at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California. She has exhibited at the California Jewish Museum, San Francisco; De Young Museum, San Francisco; San Jose ICA; and New Museum, Los Gatos. Burd’s work is in the permanent collection of the YouTube headquarters, CA and the San Francisco Airport Museum.

Artwork in exhibition:

Natalya Burd, Memories, 2021, Acrylic, two layers of plexiglass, mirror, 72 x 128 in., courtesy of the artist