Existing comment:
Reefs: Art and Nature
Top row, left-right:
Coral Life Cycle Series 1-4, 2018.
Bottom row, left-right:
Coral Fan Series 1-4, 2020.
Mixed media on canvas
Coral Life Cycle 4 from the collection of Hank Bernstein and Jim Fennel. All other works courtesy of the artist.
A coral reef structure is built by tiny polyps, which extrude calcium carbonate to form skeletons around themselves. Algae live symbiotically inside their tissues and provide essential nutrients to their hosts. Living reefs have grown and expanded over geological time, supporting a growing diversity of marine life around the globe.
Climate change is threatening both living coral reefs and the biodiversity they sustain, bringing a drastic loss of coral and the extinction of many marine species. Coral bleaching occurs when, under threat, the polyps expel their algae, lose their bright col- ors and die, leaving a stark white exoskeleton. Between 2014 and 2016, coral reefs died on a scale never seen before-a devastation so vast it is visible from satellites in space.
In the group of paintings devoted to coral reefs, Burko dramatizes the breakup of the corals and their symbionts, and the profound global changes set in motion by that mi-
cro-event. |