Nate Burbeck
Nate Burbeck, 'Portal', 2021, Oil on Canvas, 15.24 x 15.24cm
Nate Burbeck’s paintings depict psychologically infused narratives where the familiar is imbued with a sense of sublime mystery. Figures inhabit a world suspended between dreams and reality, transfixed by surreal aberrations, ethereal elements, and transported states of mind. Visual components are allusive reflections drawn in part from his past of growing up in an insular religious group, living in a milieu of end times prophecies, unsettling otherwise quiet perceptions of banal American Midwestern normalcy. These mysterious undercurrents are reimagined on canvas and fused with other influences, sourced from film, science fiction, magical realism, and sense of place to explore themes of isolation, longing, wonder, and loss in an attempt to find visual equivalents for inchoate feelings, atomized and diluted with the distance of time.
Nate Burbeck was born in 1987 and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He graduated in 2009 from St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota and in 2010 was a participant in the School of Visual Arts Summer Residency Program in New York. His work has been exhibited in various gallery and university spaces around the United States including Anna Zorina Gallery and the School of Visual Arts in New York, The Olympia Project in Brooklyn, ThinkSpace Projects in Los Angeles, Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis, GrayDuck Gallery in Austin, Texas, the Alice R. Rogers and Target galleries at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, and the University of Nebraska, Omaha. His work has appeared in numerous online and print publications including New American Paintings, Vast Magazine, Friend of the Artist and Tomorrow's Talent. He was a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant in 2015 and 2022.