September Featured Artist: Alan Newberg, World on Fire

Artist, Alan Newberg

by Alan Newberg

by Alan Newberg

This September, Collective Visions Gallery is proud to present World on Fire, a powerful new exhibition by sculptor and painter Alan Newberg. Through a series of deeply considered wood sculptures and oil paintings, Newberg explores the role of the artist as both thinker and maker—someone who shapes meaning from material, and in doing so, responds to the pressing realities of our world.

For Newberg, art is not just expression—it’s inquiry. “Art is a way of thinking and a search for meaning,” he writes. “It is also a doing.” Each of his sculptures unfolds through hundreds, even thousands, of decisions, often guided by the raw nature of the wood itself. The final forms are not just visual objects—they’re layered stories carved into space.

The centerpiece of the exhibition, World on Fire, was carved from a single black walnut log slowly drying in Newberg’s studio over the last eight years. During that time, the world shifted dramatically—plagued by fires, political upheaval, and senseless wars. The sculpture reflects this global turbulence: interlocking and twisted forms, suggestive of chaos, tension, and resilience, rest atop a painted reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica, directly linking past and present through shared imagery of conflict and survival.

Other works in the show—such as Folded Space, Emergent Chanterelle, and The Crack in Heaven—evoke natural forces and ephemeral beauty, bridging abstraction and organic form. With careful attention to grain, knot, and imperfection, Newberg allows the wood to speak, guiding the process as much as the artist himself.

The exhibition also includes a selection of oil paintings and smaller sculptural works, each one a meditation on form, balance, and the capacity of art to hold emotion, history, and insight.

Alan Newberg’s World on Fire is not just an exhibition—it’s a call to slow down, to reflect, and to engage with the world through the deeply human act of making.